LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 




Chap. _Topyriglit No.__ 



UNBTED STATES OF AMERICA. 



I- 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 

AND OTHER ADDRESSES TO YOUNG MEN 
DELIVERED IN AMERICA 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 

AND 

OTHER ADDRESSES TO YOUNG MEN 
DELIVERED IN AMERICA 



/ BY 

HENRY DRUMMOND, F.R.S.E,, F.G.S., LL.D. 

AUTHOR OF "natural LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD," " THE ASCENT 

OF MAN," " THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD," 

•'tropical AFRICA," ETC. 



JAMES POTT & CO., Publishers 

Fourth Avenue and 22d Street 

1899 



TWO COPIES HECEIVED* 

Library of Congres?, 
Office f the 

DECS- ^m 

Register of Copyrights^ 






The Ltbb'^ry 

Of CoNOkJ-.JjS 



49428 



Copyright, 1859, by 
JAMES POTT & CO. 



8£C0ND COPY, 



Press of Andrew H. Kellogg' 

New York 






CONTENTS 



PACK 



Introduction 7 

PART I. 
I^-^Stones Rolled Away 13 

PART II. 

The Man Who is Down 51 

PART III. 
One Way to Help Boys 75 

PART IV. 

An Appeal to the Outsider ; 

OR, The Claims of Christianity . . 93 

PART V. 
TiFE ON THE Top Floor 123 

PART VI. 
The Kingdom of God and Your Part in It 139 

PART Vll. 
\y The Three Elements of a Complete Life 163 



INTRODUCTION 



INTRODUCTION 

Any one who had read "The Greatest Thing 
in the World" could not help but desire to see 
and hear its author ; and, when Professor Drum- 
mond visited Boston in the spring of 1893, the 
capacity of lecture halls was taxed to the utmost. 
To accommodate thousands turned away, he re- 
peated some of his lectures in the Lowell Institute 
Course, Boston. It was a crowded Boylston Hall 
or Appleton Chapel that invariably faced him 
when he addressed the students of Harvard Uni- 
versity. He drew young men as few men can. 
He loved life and nature. He studied 



10 INTRODUCTION 

and knew men. He had read much. He had 
travelled in Europe, America, Africa, Australia 
and the New Hebrides, with eyes and ears wide 
open. With a charming personality and a rare 
grace of manner, he was a most attractive 
speaker and character, whether on the platform 
or in the quiet hour. 



The student, the evangelist and pastor, the pro- 
fessor and lecturer, the traveller and writer, has 
passed away; but his words, his writing and his 
influence cannot. He willingly gave his life to 
help others. Many a soul was brought into a 
higher life. Many a life was led into the top flat. 
Many a one was shown his part in the Kingdom 
of God. Many a man who was down was set up- 
on his feet. Many a stone of difficulty was 
rolled away. 



INTRODUCTION ii 

The addresses here given to the public in per- 
manent form for the first time, as they have 
already helped some, may yet help many more. 

The first four were delivered to students of 

Harvard University, in April, 1893. The re- 

m.aining three addresses were delivered at the 

World's Bible Students' Conference^ Northfield, 

Mass., in July, 1893. 

Luther Hess Waring. 
Scranton, Penna, 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 

Gentlemen, I am very much astonished at this 
spectacle. I told you last night it was against 
our principles in Scotland to have religious meet- 
ings on a week night. It seems to me that if 
you come to a meeting of this kind you mean 
business, and you may just as well own it. If 
a man comes to a shorthand class, it means that 
he wants to learn shorthand ; and, if a man turns 
up at what I suppose I must call a religious meet- 
ing, it means that he is less or more interested 
in the subject. 

Now I should say that I think a man has to 

give himself the benefit of that desire, and he 

15 



i6 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

should not be ashamed of it. The facts of re- 
ligion are real ; and, as mere students of life, you 
and I are bound to take cognizance of them. Of 
course, many very fair minded men are kept 
away from going into this subject as they would 
like by a number of exceedingly surface reasons. 
I cannot help calling them surface reasons. For 
instance, you meet a man who tells you that he 
doesn't like Christians, that they always put his 
back up. » 

Now, Christians often put my back up. There 
are many of them I find, with whom it takes all 
my time to get along. But that is not peculiar 
with Christians. It is only peculiar to peculiar 
Christians, and there are just as many of the 
other sort. A man might just as well say, I don't 
like sinners. A man might just as well keep 
out of the world because he doesn't like some 
people in the world, as to keep out of Christian 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 17 

circles because there are some objectionable crea- 
tures in it. We cannot be too fastidious. We 
cannot join any sect without having the weaker 
brethren in it. We cannot get on in this world 
entirely by ourselves. We must join this thing 
and that if we are going to be of any service at 
all, so that I think the difficulty of having to join 
ourselves with objectionable men applies pretty 
much all around. 

Other men are kept away from Christianity by 
what I might call its phrases. A great many 
people, not so much in your country as in ours, 
talk in a dialect. The older people especially, our 
grandmothers, have a set of phrases in which all 
their religion is imbedded, and they can't talk 
to us about religion without using those phrases ; 
and when we talk to them, if we do not use those 
phrases, we are put out of the synagogue. Now 
what we can do in this case is to translate their 



i8 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

dialect into our own language, and then translate 
into their dialect when we speak back. It is a 
different dialect. We would put it upon a dif- 
ferent basis ; but after all we mean pretty much 
the same thing, and if we can once get into this 
habit of translating our more modern way of 
putting things into this antique language that 
those worthy people use to us we will find our- 
selves more at one with them than we think. 

I meet another set of men who tell me that 
they don't like churches, that they find sermons 
stale, flat and unprofitable. Now, if any man 
here hates a dull sermon, I am with him. I have 
intense sympathy with any man who hates dull- 
ness. I think the world is far too dull, and that 
is one of the greatest reasons why the brightest 
men should throw themselves into Christianity to 
give it a broader phase to other people. One 
must confess that some church work, at all events, 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 19 

is not of a very cheerful or lively order. But 
of course that is not an argument why one should 
abstain from religious service. There are many 
reasons why we should even sacrifice ourselves 
and submit to a little dullness now and again if it 
is going to gain for us a greater good. After all, 
we live by institutions, and by fixed institutions. 
There are very few men who are able to get along 
without steady institutions of one kind and an- 
other. Some men are so tremendously free that 
they hate to be tied down to hours, to places and 
to seasons ; but there are very few men big enough 
to stand that for a long time. If we look about 
for it, we will find some place that we can go and 
get some good. When a man goes to church 
really hungry and goes because he is hungry, he 
will pick up something, no matter where it is. 
Christ himself went to church, and even if we 
know something more than the minister knows, 



V 



20 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

the fellowship, the sense of the solidarity of the 
Christian church throughout the whole world, the 
prayer and the inspiration of the hymn and the 
reading will at least do us some good. I do not 
say that a man cannot be very religious without 
that. There are tens of thousands of Christians 
who never go to church ; and there are tens of 
thousands who go to church who are not Chris- 
tians. But, as with substantial meals taken at 
intei-vals, man is no worse and may be much bet- 
ter for it. 

The religious life needs keeping up just as the 
other parts of our life need keeping up. There 
is nothing more impossible than for a man to live 
a religious life on an hour's work or an hour's 
thought a week. A man could not learn French, 
German or Latin by giving an hour per week to 
it; and how can we expect a man to get in this 
great world of the spirit, this great moral world. 



STONES ROLLED AWAY. 21 

this great ideal region, and learn anything about 
it by merely dabbling in it now and again ? We 
must make it a regular business, and, if the re- 
ligious part is a vital part of the whole nature, 
we may as well attend to it. 

You may remember a passage in Mr. Darwin's 
life. He says : *'In one respect my mind has 
changed during the last twenty or thirty years. 
Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, the poetry of 
many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, 
Byron, Coleridge and Shelley, gave me great 
pleasure; and even as a school boy I took intense 
delight in Shakespeare, and especially in the his- 
torical plays. I have always said that pictures 
gave me considerable, and music very great, de- 
light. But now for many years I cannot endure 
to read a line of poetry. I have tried lately to 
read Shakespeare, but found it so intolerably dull 
that it nauseated me. I have also lost my taste for 



22 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

pictures and music. My mind seems to have be- 
come a kind of machine for grinding general laws 
out of large collections of facts. But why this 
should have caused the atrophy of that part of the 
brain, I cannot conceive. If I had my life to live 
over again" (this is the point) '*I would have 
made the rule to read some poetry and listen to 
some music at least once every week." There is 
the greatest authority on degeneration confessing 
to his own personal degeneration, and in the same 
paragraph telling us how we may avoid it. He 
says by leaving these things out of his life for so 
many years, although he had a real liking for 
them, his nature at these points began to atrophy, 
and when he went back to them he found that 
they disgusted him; and then he says that, if he 
had his life to live again, he would have made it 
a rule to read some poetry and listen to some 
music at least once a week, and that would have 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 23 

kept the thing up. There is nothing magical 
about religion. If a man is to keep it up, he must 
use the means, just as he would use the means 
to keep up the violin, or his interest in art of any 
kmd. 

T find another set of men who have never got 
beyond this difficulty, that they find the Bible a 
somewhat arid and slow book. Now, in the first 
place, I want to say that I have, again, great sym- 
pathy with that objector because, as a matter of 
fact, there are whole tracts of the Bible which 
are distinctly dull, which are written in an archaic 
language, and about departments of history in the 
past which haven't any great living interest for us 
now. One must remember that the Bible is not 
a book, but a library consisting of a large number 
of books. By an accident, we have these books 
bound up in one as if they were one book ; and to 
say that all the books of the Bible are dull is 



24 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

simply to pass a literary judgment which is in- 
correct. It is not true, as a matter of fact, that 
all these books of the Bible are dull. Of course 
a sailing directory is very flat on the shore; but 
when a man is at sea and wants to steer his way 
through difficult and dangerous wastes, where the 
currents are strong and the passages narrow, he 
wants the best chart he can get, and he wants to 
use it as carefully as he can; and when a man 
wakens up to the difficulty of life and the reality 
of its temptations, he wants some such chart as 
he gets in that book to help him through. 

As a mere literary work, there are books there 
that are unsurpassed in the English tongue, and 
for their teaching, for their beauty and for their 
truth they have never been surpassed. Christ's 
words, of course, are beyond comparison; but 
even Paul had a far greater brain than almost any 
writer of history. 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 25 

John's writing is far deeper and more beautiful 
than Emerson's, for instance. Let the man who 
is in love with Emerson, as I am happy to say 1 
am, take up the book of John just as he would 
take up Emerson, and see if he doesn't get in it 
a great deal that Emerson has, and a great deal 
more. If a man doesn't like the Bible, it is be- 
cause he has never struck the best parts of it, or 
because he has never felt any great need in his 
own life for its teaching. As a matter of fact, 
however, reading the Bible is a new thing. There 
were Christians for hundreds and hundreds of 
years before there was any people's Bible; 
so that it is not even essential, if you can't 
overcome this matter of taste, that you should 
read the Bible. There are hundreds of Chris- 
tians at this moment who cannot read the 
Bible. There are Christians in heathen lands in 
whose language there is as yet no Bible; so that 



26 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

you see there is no absolute connection between 
these two things. Besides that, the Bible has 
now become diffused through literature to such 
an extent that you can often get the heart of the 
Bible in a very bright and living and practical 
form through other forms of literature. If you 
don't care to get it direct from the book itself, 
you can get it from our modern poetry, even from 
our modem novel ; and Christianity has now been 
so long in the world and is diffused over so many 
things that it reflects itself in almost everything 
in life. Some one was once trying to convince 
a certain lady of that point as they were sitting 
at dinner ; and he said to her that in the pudding 
which they had just eaten there was an egg, and 
that that morning at breakfast he had also eaten 
an egg. He saw the egg at breakfast, but he did 
not see the egg in the pudding; yet he had no 
doubt the egg in the pudding would nourish 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 27 

him just as much as the one he had for break- 
fast. 

A man may get his nourishment straight out 
of the Bible. He may see it there, shell and all ; 
but he may also get his nourishment mixed up 
with other ingredients, and it will do him just as 
much good. 

There is another class of men, however, whom 
none of these minor difficulties touch — men who 
have come up to college, and who have got upset 
on almost all the main doctrines of Christianity. 
Now, I want to confess to you that, so far as I 
know my old friends, they have all passed 
through that stage. Every man who is worth a 
button passes through that stage. He loses all 
the forms of truth which he got in the Sunday 
School; and, if he is true to himself, gains them 
all back again in a richer and larger and more 
permanent form. But, between the loss and the 



C" 



28 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

gain, there is sometimes a very painful and dis- 
mal interlude, during which the man thinks that 
he is never going to believe again, when every- 
thing lies in ruin, and he doesn't see where any 
reconstruction is to come in. These are dark 
days and dark years in a man's life, and they are 
inevitable to every man who thinks. They are 
inevitable, because we are all born doubters. We 
came into the world asking questions. The world 
itself is a sphinx and tempts us to keep on asking 
questions. There are no great truths in the world 
which are not to some extent doubtable; and the 
instrument with which we look at truth is largely 
impaired, and has to be corrected by long years of 
experience for its early aberration. So that when 
we look at truth we only see part of it, and we 
see that part of it distorted. The result is a cer- 
tain amount of twilight where we expected full 
day. One consolation to give that man is to tell 



_i. 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 29 

him that we have all been through that. We take 
it like the measles. It lasts a certain number of 
months or years, and then we come out with our 
constitutions better than ever. There is a real 
rationale for that. Everything in the world 
passes through these stages, provided it be grow- 
ing. You remember how the philosophers describe 
it. They describe the three great stages as posi- 
tion, opposition and composition. Position : Some- 
body lays down a truth, you look at it and say, 
**Yes, that is truth." I heard a clergyman say 
that when I was a boy, and I believed it. Then, 
one day, you read a book or hear some one else 
talk, and he put a query on it; and then there 
came the revolt against it, and for a long time 
your mind was seething with opposition to this 
original thing which was positive. And then you 
went on and put all these contradictory things 
together and composed them into a unity again. 



30 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

You reached the third stage — that of composi- 
tion. 

It is the same with everything. You begin to 
learn the piano, and after you have played about 
a year you think you know all about it ; and you 
tackle the most difficult pieces, dash away at them, 
and think you can do it as well as anybody. Then 
you go into Boston and hear some great pianist, 
and come home a sad man. You see you know 
nothing about it. For the next six months you 
do not touch a single piece. You play scales day 
after day and practice finger exercises. Then, 
after six months, you say: "What is the use of 
playing scales ? Music does not exist for scales f 
and you turn to your old pieces and play them 
over again in an entirely different way. You 
have got it all back again. There are men here 
going through the scale period with regard to 
religious questions. What is the use of all this 



STONES ROLLED AWAY, 31 

opposition ? Is it not time to go back again, you 
ask, and put all this experience into something, 
and get at some truth at the other side? You 
see the same truth in a novel. Volume L, they 
will. Volume IL, they won't. Volume III., 
they do. 

We see the same thing in art. A man paints 
a picture. He thinks he has painted a grand one. 
After a few months, some one comes along and 
says : "Look here ! Look at that boat ! You 
don't call that a boat? And look at that leaf! 
That is not a leaf." And you discover that you 
have never looked at a boat and never seen a leaf. 
You are disheartened and do nothing the next 
six months but draw boats and leaves ; and, after 
you have drawn boats and leaves until you are 
sick, you say : "What is the use of drawing boats 
and leaves ?'' and try again and produce your first 
landscape. But it is altogether a different thing 



32 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

from the picture you painted before. Now, when 
a man is working over the details of the Chris- 
tian reHgion and struggling to get one thing ad- 
justed and another, he will very soon find out that 
that does not amount to much. It is a useful 
thing, and he has to go through it, but he has 
to come out the other side also and put these 
things together. 

The best advice, I think, that can be given to a 
man who is in this difficulty is, in the first place, 
to read the best authorities on the subject; not 
to put himself off with cheap tracts and popular 
sermons, but to go to the scientific authorities. 
There are as great scientific authorities in Ger- 
many, in England and in America on all the sub- 
ject matter of theology as there are on the subject 
matter of chemistry or geology. Go to the au- 
thorities. You may not agree with them when 
vou have read them. But if a man reads all the 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 33 

books on the opposition side he will very natu- 
rally get a distorted view of it. So, for every 
book he reads on the one side, he should, in jus- 
tice, read a book on the other side. 

Next, let a man remember that the great thing 
is not to think about religion, but to do it. We 
do not live in a "think^' world. It is a real world. 
You do not believe that botany lies in the pages of 
Sachs. Botany lies out there in the flowers and 
in the trees, and it is living. And religion does 
not live in the pages of the doctrinal books, but in 
human life — in conflict with our own temptations, 
and in the conduct and character of our fellow- 
beings. When we abandon this ''think-world" 
of ours and get out into the real world, we will 
find that, after all, these doubts are not of such 
immense importance, and that we can do a great 
deal of good in the world. 

For my part, I have as many doubts on all the 



34 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

great subjects connected with theology as prob- 
ably any one here ; but they do not interfere in the 
very slightest with my trying, in what humble 
way I can, to follow out the religion of Christ. 
They do not even touch that region ; and I don't 
want to lose these doubts. I don't want any man 
to rob me of my problem. I have no liking and 
little respect for the cock-sure Christian — a man 
who can demonstrate some of the most tremen- 
dous verities of the faith, as he can the Fifth Book 
of Euclid. I want a religion and theology with 
some of the infinite about it, and some of the 
shadow as well as some of the light ; and if, by 
reading up one of the great doctrines for five or 
six years, I get some little light upon it, it is only 
to find there are a hundred upon which I could 
spend another hundred lives. And if I should 
try to meet some specific point upon which you 
are at sea to-night, it would not do you much 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 35 

good. To-morrow a new difficulty would start 
in your mind, and you would be simply where 
you were. I would be stopping up only one of 
your wells. You would open another out of the 
first book you read. Try to separate theological 
doctrine from practical religion. Believe me that 
you can follow Christ in this University without 
having solved any of these problems. Why, there 
was a skeptic among the first twelve disciples, 
and one of the best of them, and one of the most 
loyal of them. That man sat down at the first 
Lord's table, and Christ never said any hard 
words against him. He tried to teach him. That 
is the only attitude, it seems to me, we can take 
to Christ still. We can enter His school as schol- 
ars, and sit at His feet and learn what we can ; 
and by doing His will in the practical things of 
life, we shall know of this and that doctrine, 
whether it be of God. The only use of truth is 



36 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

that it can do somebody some good. The only 
use of truth is in its sanctifying power ; and that 
is the pecuHarity of the truth of Christianity, that 
it has this sanctifying power and makes men bet^ 
ter. 

Now you say: "What am I to do? If I am 
to block up this avenue and am not to expect very 
much along the line of mere belief, in what direc- 
tion am I to shape my Christian life?" Well, I 
cannot in the least answer that. Every man must 
shape his Christian life for himself, according 
as his own talents may lead him ; but the great 
thing to do is simply to become a follower of 
Christ. That is to become a Christian. There is 
nothing difficult or mysterious about it. A Dar- 
winian is a man who follows Darwin, studies his 
books, accepts his views and says, "I am a Dar- 
winian." You look into Christ's life, into His 
influence; you look at the needs of the world; 



STONES ROLLED AWAY Z7 

you see how the one meets the other; you look 
into your own life and see how Christ's life meets 
your life ; and you say, "I shall follow this teacher 
and leader until I get a better." From the time 
you do that, you are a Christian. You may be a 
very poor one. A man who enlists is a very poor 
soldier for the first few years, but he is a soldier 
from the moment he enlists; and the moment a 
man takes Christ to be the center of his life that 
man becomes a Christian. Of course that makes 
a great change in his life. His friends will know- 
it to-morrow. On the steam engine you have 
seen the apparatus at the side called the eccentric. 
It has a different center from all the other wheels. 
Now, the Christian man is to some extent an 
eccentric. His life revolves around a different 
center from many people round about him. Of 
course, it is the other people who are eccentric 
because the true center of life is the most perfect 



38 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

life, the most perfect man, the most perfect ideal ; 
and the man who is circulating around that is 
living the most perfect. At the same time, that 
man's life will to some extent be different from 
the lives round about him, and to some extent he 
will be a marked man. 

But what difference will it make to a man him- 
self? For one thing, it will keep you straight. 
I fancy most of the men here are living straight 
lives as it is; but it is impossible that every man 
here is. Well, I will tell you how to keep your 
life straight from this time — how your hunger 
after righteousness can be met. If you become a 
Christian, you will lead a straight life. That is 
not all. If you become a Christian, you will help 
other men to lead straight lives. Seek first the 
kingdom of God and His righteousness. The 
only chance that this world has of becoming a 
righteous world is by the contagion of the Chris- 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 39 

tian men in it. I do not know any country with 
the splendid pretensions and achievements of 
America where there is so much unrighteousness 
in poHtics and to some extent in commerce, and 
where shady things are not only winked at, but 
admired. That is acknowledged and deplored 
by every right thinking man in the country. I 
get it, not from observation, but from yourselves. 
There is not a day passes that I do not find men 
deploring political corruption and the want of 
commercial integrity, in some districts of this 
country, at all events. Now nothing can change 
that state of affairs unless such men as yourselves 
throw your influence on to the side of righteous- 
ness and determine that you will live to make this 
country a little straighter than you found it. 

There is a career in Christianity as well as an 
individual life. How do you test the greatness 
of a career? You test it by its influence. Well, 



40 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

can you point me to any influence in the world in 
the past which has had anything Hke the influence 
of the name to which I have asked you to give 
your Hfe's adherence? That Hfe started without 
a chance of succeeding in anything, according to 
the received theories of a successful life. Christ 
was born in a manger. If you and I had been 
born in a manger, the shame of it would have ac- 
companied us through our whole lives ; and yet 
there is not one of us born to-day who is not 
baptized in the name of Christ and who has not 
a Christian name. Christ went to no university, 
and had no education; and there is not a univer- 
sity in Europe or in America which is not found- 
ed in the name of Christ. This university was 
founded in the name of Christ. Aye, and the 
very money which has gone to build the univer- 
sities of the world has come from the followers 
of Christ. The education of the world, gentle- 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 41 

men, has been done by the followers of Jesus 
Christ. Christ had no political influence, and 
sought none ; yet there is not a President placed 
in the White House, there is not a sovereign in 
Europe placed upon a throne, but acknowledges, 
in the doing of it and in public, that the power 
to do it has come from Christ, and that the 
object in doing it is to secure the coming 
of Christ's kingdom. Take it in any direction, 
and you will find that this influence, judged from 
mere worldly standards of success, has been 
supreme. 

Napoleon said, "I do not understand that man. 
He must have been more than human. I used to 
be able," he said on St. Helena, "to get people to 
die for me. I got hundreds of thousands of 
them, but I had to be there. Now that I am here 
on this island, I can't get a man. But He," said 
he, ''gets hundreds of thousands of the best men 



42 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

in the world to lay down their whole lives for 
Him every day." Judged as mere influence from 
the standpoint of an ambitious man like Napo- 
leon, you see that that Life was supreme. 

You remiember the dinner that Charles Lamb 
gave to some literary men, and how they were 
discussing after dinner what their attitude would 
be if certain great figures of the past were to come 
into their dining room. After they had all spok- 
en. Lamb said : 

"Well, it looks to me like this, that if Shakes- 
peare entered the room I should rise up to greet 
him ; but if Christ entered the room, I should 
kneel down and keep silent." 

And so I ask you if you have feelings of that 
kind about any figure in history compared to the 
feelings that spring into your mind when you 
try to contemplate that Life. Some of you have 
never read Christ's life. You have picked up a 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 43 

parable here and a miracle there, and a scrap of 
history between ; but you have never read that 
biography as you have read the biography of 
Washington, Webster, or the life of Columbus. 
Read it. Go home and read one of the four little 
books which tell you about His life. Take Mat- 
thew, for instance ; and if you don't run aground 
in the 5th chapter and find yourself compelled to 
spend a week over it, you haven't much moral 
nature left. I have known men who have tried 
that experiment, who have begun to read the 
gospel of Matthew, and by the time they had fin- 
ished reading the 5th chapter, they had thrown in 
their lot with the Person who forms the subject 
of that book. There is no other way of getting to 
know about Christ unless you read His life, at 
least as a beginning. If you want to become a 
Christian you must read up, and that is the thing 
to read. If you like, after that you can read 



44 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

the other lives of Christ. How do men get to 
know one another? They simply take to one an- 
other. Two men meet here to-night. They go 
downstairs and exchange greetings. To-morrow 
night they meet in each other's rooms. By the 
end of a month they have got to know each other 
a little, and after another year of college life they 
have become sworn friends. 

A man becomes a little attracted to Christ. That 
grows and grows, into a brighter friendship, and 
that grows into a great passion, and the man gives 
his life to Christ's interest. He counts it the 
highest ambition he can have to become a man 
such as Christ was. You see there is nothing 
profound about a religion of that kind. It is a 
religion that lies in the line of the ideals a young 
man forms, and that all the reading that he meets 
with from day to day fashions. In fact, it is a 
man's ideal turning up, and the man who turns 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 45 

his back upon that is simply turning his back 
upon his one chance of happiness in Hfe and of 
making anything off life. Every life that is not 
lived in that line is out of the true current of his- 
tory, to say nothing else. It is out of the stream 
— the main stream that is running through the 
ages, and that is going to sweep everything before 
it. A man who does not live that life may not be 
a bad man. The Bible does not say that every- 
body who is not a Christian is a notorious sinner ; 
but it says that the man who lives outside that is 
wasting his life. He may not be doing wrong, 
but his life is lost. "He that loveth his life," 
Christ said, ''shall lose it ; and he that hateth his 
life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.'' 
I am not ashamed to quote that to you ; and 
I ask you to regard it with the same validity, 
and more, that you will give to any other quota- 
tion. 



46 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

You will not accuse me of cant because I have 
used sacred words in this talk. There are techni- 
cal terms in religion just as in science and phi- 
losophy. Just as in science I should speak of 
protoplasm, of oxygen or carbonic acid gas, so in 
talking of religion I must talk about faith and 
Jesus Christ. Just as I should quote authorities 
in speaking of chemistry or political economy, so 
I must use authorities in speaking about Christ. 
You will not take the words that I have said to- 
night as a mere expression of phraseology of a 
cant description, because it is not that ; and I 
would ask those of you who are very much fright- 
ened to use such words to consider whether it is 
not a rational thing and a necessary thing, if you 
speak at all on this subject, to use these words. 
We must not be too fastidious, or thin-skinned, or 
particular on a point like that. While we are not 
in any degree to advertise our Christianity by our 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 47 

language, there are occasions, and this is one, 
when these things are necessary. 

I want to say, in closing, that I hear almost 
extraordinary accounts of you Harvard men. 
Robert Browning once came to the Edinburgh 
students to talk to them ; and he said, after he had 
gone away, that he had never in his life seen such 
a body of young men. Now I have no acquaint- 
ance with you whatever; but I have been asking 
up and down this district what sort of men the 
Harvard men are, and I want to let you know that 
you have a fairly good character. So far as I 
can learn, you have a character such as none of 
our Scotch universities have. Now live up to it. 
Let this university in the years to come be famous 
over America not only for its education, but for 
its sense of honor and manliness, and purity an^ 
Christianity. Seek first the kingdom of God. 
You know the whole truth. Live it. Want of 



48 STONES ROLLED AWAY 

interest in religion does not acquit you of taking 
your share in it. Why should I be here to talk 
to you? A Scotchman hates talking. I believe 
an American is dying to talk all the time. Well, 
I say want of religion does not absolve you from 
taking your share of it. The fact that you do 
not care about Christ does not alter the fact that 
Christ cares about you, that He wants you men, 
and that His kingdom cannot go on unless He 
gets such men as you. Are we to leave the great- 
est scheme that has ever been propounded to be 
carried out by duffers? It is easier, somebody 
says, to criticise the greatest scheme superbly than 
to do the smallest thing possible. The man who 
is looking on from the outside sees things in the 
game that the players do not see. He sees this 
bit of bad play and that. Well, stop criticising 
the game. Take off your coat, and come and 
help us. Our side is strong, and it is getting 



STONES ROLLED AWAY 49 

stronger ; but we want the best men. Christian- 
ity ought to have the superlative men here in 
every department — in classics, in poetry, in litera- 
ture, in humor, in everything that goes to the 
making of a man. The best gifts should be given 
to Christ. We are apt to despise Christianity and 
keep away from it because there are many weak- 
minded people in it. That is one reason why we 
ought to take off our coats and throw ourselves 
into it, heart and soul. And I leave you with 
that appeal. I appeal to the strong men here to 
consider their position and see if they can do any- 
thing better with their life than to help on this 
great cause. 



AN ADDRESS 



TO 



THE MAN WHO IS DOWN 



11 



AN ADDRESS 

TO 

THE MAN WHO IS DOWN 

To-night I want to talk to the man who is 
down, to the man who has his back to the wall, 
and who is being embattled by his own tempta- 
tions. It is, perhaps, not an academic subject 
but it is the greatest of all subjects on which one 
can speak to young men. There are men here 
who are lost in the abyss ; but there are more men 
who are on the brink of the precipice. Tempta- 
tion is a universal experience — the one thing that 
makes every man his brother, and creates within 

53 



54 AN ADDRESS TO THE 

any one who thinks about it a grave sense of ten- 
derness as he thinks of those around him, when he 
remembers that every man he meets has the same 
black spot in his nature that he has, and the same 
terrible fight going on from day to day. But, 
gentlemen, temptation is more than a universal 
experience. It is an individual thing. Just as you 
have your own handwriting, your own face, or 
your own walk, you have your own temptation — 
different in every case, but generally some one 
temptation which means everything to you, 
which sums up the whole battle of life, and which, 
if you could conquer, you would conquer the 
world. That temptation follows you wherever 
you go like your shadow. I have gone into the 
heart of Africa. When I opened the curtains of 
my tent in the morning, the first face I saw was 
the hideous face of my own temptation. Go 
where you like, you cannot avoid that. It will fol- 



MAN WHO IS DOWN 55 

low you wherever you go, and lie with you in the 
grave. Temptation is not only a universal ex- 
perience and a personal experience, but you have 
doubtless noticed this about it, that it is very 
lonely. It cuts a man off in a moment from all 
his fellowmen; and in the silence of his own heart 
he finds himself fighting out that battle on which 
the issues of life hang. Christ trod the wine press 
alone, and so do you and I. That is one of the 
things that makes it harder, because there is no 
one to blame us when we go wrong, and there is 
no one to applaud us when we do right. 

More than that, temptation is a pitiless thing. 
It goes into the church and picks off the 
man in the pulpit. It goes into the uni- 
versity and picks off the flower of the class. 
It goes into the Senate and picks off the 
great man. Let him that thinketh he stand- 
eth, however high up, however sheltered, take 



I 



56 AN ADDRESS TO THE 

heed lest he fall. Why is it that we have to run 
the gauntlet of temptation all our lives, and what 
does it mean? Can we analyze it? We have seen 
its strength. Can we find out whence it comes 
and how to meet it? There are many theories as 
to how it came into our nature. Some think there 
is a virus in human nature somewhere, a bias to- 
wards wrong; but I don't think we need to look 
very far for the origin at least of a great many of 
our temptations. We have in our bodies the 
residua of the animal creation. We have bones 
and muscles and organs which are now mere 
curiosities, but which once played a great part in 
the life of our progenitor; and I suppose it is now 
accepted as a scientific fact, at all events so far 
as the body is concerned, that it has come down 
the long ladder from the invertebrate world. That 
is to say, we have in our nature a part of the ani- 
mal; and if we have an animal's body in us, we 



MAN WHO IS DOWN 57 

have to a certain extent the residua of an ani- 
mal's mind, of an animal's proclivities and pas- 
sions. Whether that is the origin of them or not, 
it is certain every man among us has a certain 
residuum of the animal in him. After passing 
through the animal stage^ it is believed that man 
passed through a long, long discipline in the sav- 
age state; so that, in addition to the animal, relics 
of the savage are still left in our nature. 

There are two great classes of sins — sins of the 
body and sins of the disposition. The prodigal 
son is a typical instance of sins of the body; and 
the elder brother a typical illustration of sins of 
the disposition. He was just as bad as the prod- 
igal, probably worse. The one set of tempta- 
tions comes from the animal and the other from 
the savage. What are the characteristics of the 
savage? Laziness for one thing, and selfishness 
for another. The savage does nothing but lie 



58 AN ADDRESS TO THE 

in the sun all day and allow the fruits to drop 
into his mouth. He has no struggle for life. Na- 
ture has been so kind as to supply all his wants; 
and he is, above all, characteristic of selfishness. 
He has no one to think about or care for, nor 
has he any capacity. A great preacher said not 
long ago to his congregation that he would tell 
them the mark of the beast, and that he also knew 
its number. He said the mark of the beast was 
selfishness, and its number was No. i. Now the 
mark of the beast, selfishness, is in every man's 
breast, less or more. We are built in three stories 
— the bottom, the animal ; a little higher up, the 
savage; and on the top, the man. That is the old 
Pauline trichotomy — body, soul, spirit. Paul 
spoke of this body of death. Science speaks of it 
in almost precisely the same language. What- 
ever the origin, that is the construction of a man. 
He is built in those three lavers. With this an- 



MAN WHO IS DOWN 59 

alysis, it is perhaps easier to see how temptation 
may be met. 

Many a man goes through hfe hanging his 
head with shame and Hving without his self-re- 
spect because he has never discovered the dis- 
tinction between temptation and sin. It is only 
when a man sees temptation coming and goes 
out to meet it, welcomes it, plays with it and in- 
vites it to be his guest that it passes from tempta- 
tion into sin ; but, until he has opened the door of 
his own accord and let it in, he has done no 
wrong. He has been a tempted man — not a sin- 
ful man. The proof, of course, that temptation is 
no sin is that Christ was tempted in all points like 
as we are, yet without sin. Many a man is thrown 
back in his attempts to live a new life by the 
clinging to him of this residua of his past; and he 
does not discover until perhaps too late that there 
is nothing wrong in these things until they have 



66 AN ADDRESS TO THE 

passed a certain point. If he sees them coming 
and turns his back upon them, he has not sinned. 
Indeed, temptation is not only not sin, but it is 
the most valuable ingredient in human nature. 
Who was it that said, 'The greatest of all tempta- 
tions is to be without any"? The man who has 
no temptation has no chance of becoming a man 
at all. The only way to get character is to have 
temptation. If a man never exercises his muscle, 
he will get no muscle. If a man never exercises 
his moral nature in opposing temptation, he will 
get no muscle in his character. Temptation is an 
opportunity of virtue. What makes a good pic- 
ture? Practice. What makes a good oarsman? 
Practice. What makes a good cricketer? Prac- 
tice. Temptation is the practice of the soul; and 
the man who has most temptations has most prac- 
tice. I fancy we all imagine we have more tempt- 
ations than anybody else. That is a universal 



MAN WHO IS DOWN 6i 

delusion. But^ instead of praying to be delivered 
from our temptations, we ought to try to under- 
stand their essential place in the moral world. 
Taken from us, these would leave us without a 
chance of becoming strong men. We should be 
insipid characters, flaxen and useless. That is 
why the New Testament says the almost astonish- 
ing thing: "Count it all joy when ye fall into 
divers temptations." We are apt to call it hard 
lines because we are tempted. James says, count 
it joy ; congratulate yourself because of your own 
temptation. It is the struggle for life almost 
solely which has helped on the evolution of the 
animal kingdom, passing on into the moral re- 
gion and giving you practice in growth. 

Now, then, granting that this discipline is to 
be ours, that every day of our lives we have to 
face temptation, how are we to set about it? We 
have seen that temptation lies in the projection 



62 AN ADDRESS TO THE 

on the human area of our life of the animal and of 
the savage. I think the first thing we have to do is 
to deal decisively with those two parts of our na- 
ture. The animal body was finished thousands and 
thousands of years ago. Nature took a long time 
to work it out, then stopped and went on to de- 
velop the mind. Let us recognize the development 
of the body as a fact in the past, and have no more 
to do with it. The body is finished. The hand of 
creation is done working at it. That is what 
Paul meant very largely when he gave it as his 
advice to men to get over temptation, "Reckon 
ye yourselves dead." Reckon that all beneath. 
It is not only wrong to allow the body to prevail 
in a man's life, but it is a denial of his develop- 
ment. It is unnatural and irrational. It is con- 
trary to the teachings of science, borrowed alto- 
gether from the teachings of religion. Therefore, 
the first thing a man must do is to make up his 



MAN WHO IS DOWN 63 

mind that the body which is prompting him is a 
dead thing and is to be taken as a dead thing. If 
we can give our animal nature its true place^ we 
will soon learn to rise above it. What did Cato 
do when he was buffeted ? Ask Seneca. He did 
not strike back, fly into a passion: he did not re- 
sent it, but denied that it had been done. That is 
to say, the body being nothing, nothing had hap- 
pened. 

But that is not enough. We cannot live nega- 
tively. It is not enough to forsake the old life, 
the old habit; but we must take another piece of 
advice which I think the New Testament also 
sums up for us in language of exceeding sim- 
plicity and yet of absolute scientific accuracy. 
Paul says : "Walk in the spirit." Live in the top 
flat. You find yourself living in the animal part 
of your being. Escape and get into the upper 
story, where the roof is open to God, and where 



64 AN ADDRESS TO THE 

you can move amongst beautiful things, and 
amongst holy memories and amongst high ideals. 
Walk in the spirit and ye shall not fulfill the lusts 
of the flesh. A man can't do it. That is to say, he 
has to evolve the past, the animal and the savage, 
and develop the new nature. The new nature is 
renewed from day to day, little by little. Just as 
the body is built up, microscopic cell by micro- 
scopic cell, so the new nature is built up by a long 
series of crucifixions of the old nature, by taking 
in food from the higher world and getting those 
things built into our nature which work for right- 
eousness and truth and beauty and purity. 

Now, the man who encourages the higher part 
of his nature continuously will get an absolute 
victory over the lower parts of his being. He will 
come to live in those higher parts of his being. 
It will become as habitual to live there as it was 
to live in the lower; and, while this building up is 



MAN WHO IS DOWN 65 

going on within, there will be the degeneration 
of the old nature. How has man evolved past the 
animal and the savage, and how has so much that 
is in them passed away from him? By mere dis- 
use. And so, by the mere disuse of the propen- 
sities of the body and the discouragement of sel- 
fish and petty interests, by merely giving up the 
animal ways and the animal passions, and the 
savage tempers and the savage laziness, the im- 
pulse, the function which makes these things, will 
wither — atrophy. As the one goes on, the other 
inevitably follows. As the old man passes away, 
the new man is renewed in righteousness. That 
can be explained not only in the language of de- 
velopment but in the language of psychology as 
a perfectly rational principle. A man cannot 
have two things in consciousness at the same mo- 
ment. Suppose a man has been lost out in the 
West and wandered away from the railway depot 



66 AN ADDRESS TO THE 

where he had put up at a hotel. Perhaps he has 
been four or five days on the prairie. One day he 
staggers back, almost dropping with hunger and 
calls out for food ; but finds lying upon his table, 
while waiting for food, a telegram reporting the 
sudden death of his wife. The hunger is gone, 
completely gone. The man who was perishing a 
few moments ago is now absolutely above it ; and 
if I could keep up the emotion of sorrow, I could 
keep down forever the appetite of hunger. If you 
want to get over an appetite on philosophical 
principles, not to speak of religion, the thing to 
do is to pass into another region, and let your 
m.ind be preoccupied with something higher. Un- 
less you take in the higher, it is tremendously 
difficult to crush out the lower. The new man 
can only be put on as the old man is put off. 

You remember Augustine's history of tempta- 
tion in four words — cogifatio^ imaginatio, delec- 



MAN WHO IS DOWN 67 

tatio and assensio : a thought, a picture, a fascina- 
tion, and a fall. You can cut off the series be- 
tween the first and second. Between the second 
and third, it is almost impossible. Between the 
third and fourth, it is absolutely impossible. 
When the image is thrown upon the screen and 
you are delighting in it and it is just beginning 
to enthrall you, you can still do one thing. You 
can suddenly throw another image on the screen 
and look at that. If you look for two seconds at 
the first image you are lost; but if you look one 
second you are not yet lost, and there is still a 
chance to be saved. You can throw another im- 
age over it and let the first dissolve away; and, 
by the mere possession of consciousness, you 
have got over that temptation. 

You see, then, how, upon merely natural prin- 
ciples, it is possible to fight temptation. If we 
simply walk in the spirit, we shall not fulfill the 



68 AN ADDRESS TO THE 

lusts of the flesh. We must evolve past them, in 
plain words. By cultivating ideals of all kinds 
and by strengthening our moral nature by all the 
opportunities we can get in society, in literature 
and in the church, we will gradually accumulate a 
body, a higher body, of life and mind and truth, 
in which we can live; and the old tenements in 
which we lived will not only be uninhabited but 
uninhabitable. Hence the value of everything 
that is beautiful and pure and lovely and whole- 
some in the world; and not only their use as aux- 
iliaries to the religious life, but as indispensable to 
it; because all these are things in the higher na- 
ture, and the man who cultivates them is building 
up a region in which he can live. A man must 
live. He must live in the body, in the savage or 
in the man. At every moment he must live, and 
so at every moment he must make his choice. He 
cannot suppress it. If you take this subject in 



MAN WHO IS DOWN 69 

terms of energy, you will find that the energy 
which leads to sin must not be suppressed, but 
must be transformed into an energy which leads 
to virtue ; so that when the desire to do something 
wrong comes in, instead of trying to suppress 
that desire, we have simply to turn the helm in 
the right direction ; and in the new channel it will 
not only save us from a fall which we would have 
had, if we had allowed it to go the other way, but 
it will carry us higher towards the new life. 

Now I have tried to explain the way in which 
any man here can rise above himself and be a 
man. I care not how far he has dropped. It is an 
historical fact that a man can be saved to the 
uttermost. You say to me, is there no religion in 
all this? It is all religion. You say, do I not 
need to put more religion into it? The more the 
better. I have spoken of walking in the spirit. 
I have spoken of ideals. I know no ideal that 



70 AN ADDRESS TO THE 

will act so promptly as the ideal of the perfect 
Man. I know no picture that you can throw 
upon the screen which will fascinate more imme- 
diately than the picture of the character of Christ. 
You may throw people upon the screen, a line of 
poetry, an epigram from a moralist, a memory of 
your mother, a warning of some one you love, 
and all these are reflections in some form of 
Christ ; and they will all be effective up to a point. 
But most of all effective is the power of Christ 
Himself; and, unless a man has a moral environ- 
ment which is full of these things, he cannot live. 
There is no hope for his new life, unless he has 
that. No man can live without these things mor- 
ally. Take that gas which gives us light. The 
light is not in the gas. It is half in the air and half 
in the gas. Take away the half from the air, and 
the gas goes out. ''Without me, ye can do noth- 
ing." Your life will go out. Without Me, wheth- 



MAN WHO IS DOWN 71 

er as the Light of the world itself, or as diffused 
through books, and through men and through 
churches, without that your life will come to 
nothing; but, if you take that and all the reflec- 
tions of it, and let these constitute a spiritual at- 
mosphere about you, your redemption from this 
hour is a certainty. There is no haphazard about 
Christianity. It is based upon the laws of nature 
and the laws of the human mind. 

The man who lives in Christ cannot go wrong, 
lie will be kept. In the nature of things, he must 
be kept. He cannot sin. You remember John 
said : "Whosoever sinneth hath not seen Him, 
neither known Him." John's Friend was such, so 
inspiring and so influential, that it was incon- 
ceivable to John that anybody could ever have 
met Him without forevermore trying to live like 
Him. Sin is abashed in the presence of the purity 
of Jesus Christ. There are many heroes in life. 



^2 AN ADDRESS TO THE 

They will all help a man ; but we will get on better 
and quicker by giving ourselves to Christ. 

I have just two things to add. The first is: if 
any man here to-night takes this seriously and 
means business ; if he means for the future not to 
keep up the sham fight that he has been pretend- 
ing to wage, and means to get to the bottom of 
things, let me ask him for a few days from this 
time to treat himself as a man who has been very 
ill and dare not do anything. Let him consider 
himself as a convalescent for a few weeks and 
take care where he goes, what he reads, what he 
looks at, and the people he speaks to. He is not 
strong enough for the outer air. When he first 
begins the new life, he is young and tender. 
Therefore, let him beware of the first few days. 
Mortality is greatest amongst children for the 
first few hours : then it is greater for the first few 
days; then it is great for the next few months. 



MAN WHO IS DOWN 73 

and lessens as the children grow older. If you 
are careful not to catch cold for the first few 
weeks after you begin to lead a new life, you will 
succeed; but, if you do to-morrow what you did 
to-day, you will go wrong, because you are not 
strong enough to resist. You will have to build 
up this new body cell by cell, day by day, just as 
the old body of temptation has been built up. If 
any man here knows any other man who is in 
that convalescent condition, let him take care, and 
neither by jest, or word, or temptation, throw that 
man back. Stand by him, if you know such a 
man. If you are such a man, do not be ashamed 
to get somebody else to back you and go along 
with you. Very few men can live a solitary 
Christian life. You will find it a great source of 
strength to get another man's life wound about 
you. You can help each other. 

The other thing I want to say is this : Do not 



74 AN ADDRESS TO THE MAN 

imagine that you can get deliverance from sin 
alone — I mean without getting other things, and 
without doing other things. Deliverance from sin 
is only a part of the Christian life — by no means 
the whole. It is only one wing of the new nature; 
but no man can get on with one v/ing. Deliver- 
ance from temptation is only one function of the 
new nature. Therefore, you must consecrate 
your whole life to Christianity, and go into it 
wholly and with a whole heart, if you expect to 
get deliverance in this one direction ; and the best 
way you can do that is to make up your mind that 
you will give much of your life to Christianity, to 
purify the air of the world, so that other men will 
feel less temptation than you do. Sin is a kind of 
bacillus, and it cannot take root in the world un- 
less there is a soil, and it is our business to make 
the world's soil pure and sanitarily sweet, so that 
the disease of sin cannot exist. 



ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 



Ill 

ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 

I am very much pleased to find the Boys^ 
Brigade receiving University recognition. I am 
not aware that it has had this honor before in its 
history. 

The idea of the Brigade is this. It is a new 
movement for turning out boys, instead of sav- 
ages. The average boy, as you know, is a pure 
animal. He is not evolved; and, unless he is 
taken in hand by somebody who cares for him 
and who understands him, he will be very apt to 
make a mess of his life — not to speak of the lives 
of other people. We endeavor to get hold of this 
animal. You do not have the article here, and do 

77 



78 ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 

not quite understand the boy I mean. The large 
cities of the old world are infested by hundreds 
and thousands of these ragamuffins, as we call 
them — young roughs who have nobody to look 
after them. The Sunday-school cannot handle 
these boys. The old method was for somebody 
to form them into a class and try to get even at- 
tention from them. Half the time was spent in 
securing order. 

The new method is simply this: You get a 
dozen boys together, and, instead of forming 
them into a class, you get them into some little 
hall and put upon every boy's head a little mili- 
tary cap that costs in our country something like 
twenty cents, and you put around his waist a belt 
that costs about the same sum, and you call him 
a soldier. You tell him, "Now, Private Hopkins, 
stand up. Hold up your head. Put your feet to- 
gether." And you can order that boy about till 



ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 79 

he is black in the face, just because he has a cap 
on his head and a belt around his waist. The 
week before you could do nothing with him. If 
he likes it, you are coming next Thursday night. 
He is not doing any favor by coming. You are 
doing him a favor; and if he does not turn up at 
eight o'clock, to the second, the door will be 
locked. If his hair is not brushed and his face 
washed, he cannot enter. Military discipline is 
established from the first moment. You give the 
boys three-fourths of an hour's drill again, and in 
a short time you have introduced quite a number 
of virtues into that boy's character. You have 
taught him instant obedience. If he is not obe- 
dient, you put him into the guard house, or tell 
him he will be drummed out of the regiment; and 
he will never again disobey. If he is punctual 
and does his drill thoroughly, tell him that at the 
end of the year he will get a stripe. He will get 



8o ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 

a cent's worth of braid. You have his obedience, 
punctuaHty, intelligence and attention for a year 
for one cent. Then you have taught him cour- 
tesy. He salutes you and feels a head taller. 
Everything is done as if you were a real captain 
and he a real private. He calls you ''Captain." 
Each boy has a rifle that costs a dollar; but there 
is no firing. There is a bayonet drill without a 
bayonet. The first year they have military drill, 
and the second year bayonet exercises — an abso- 
lute copy of the army drill. The Brigade incul- 
cates a martial, but not a warlike, spirit. The only 
inducement to bring the boys together at first is 
the drill. You might think it is a very poor one; 
but it is about the strongest inducement you 
could ofTer. 

That is the outward machinery ; but it is a mere 
take-in. The boy doesn't know it. The real ob- 
ject of the Brigade is to win that boy for Chris- 



H 



ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS Si 

tianity — to put it quite plainly. It does not make 
the slightest secret of its aims. 

On all its literature is: "The object of the 
Brigade shall be the advancement of Christ's 
Kingdom among boys, and the promotion of 
habits of reverence, discipline, self-respect, and 
all that tends toward a true Christian manhood." 

After you have your boy and are sure of him, 
every drill is opened with a couple of minutes of 
prayer. The boys stand in line at ''attention," 
with caps off, while a sort of blessing is asked. 
Then drill for three-fourths of an hour. After that 
the Captain gives them a little talk about any- 
thing — business prosperity, courtesy, courage, 
temptation, or anything. After that, all repeat 
the Lord's Prayer and dismiss. Then on Sunday 
almost all the companies have Bible class, with 
the same punctuality, interest and attention as 
during the week day. The boy treats his Captain 



82 ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 

as before. They sit like statues during the Bible 
lesson; and, if they are not there to the minute, 
they are shut out. Having influence over them, 
the Captain maintains it, and how much more apt 
the boys will be to pick up what he says. The 
thorough-going Captain will of course do a great 
deal more than in the Bible class; and very few 
stop at that. Some men get up football clubs and 
get fields, give up their own Saturday afternoons 
— which are a great holiday with us — to act as 
umpire for the boys' matches. Our captains are 
just one remove from the boys whom they teach, 
so that the boys are not at all afraid of them. The 
presence of the captain on the athletic field means, 
in the first place, that there will be no foul lan- 
guage and no foul play. And he, of course, thus 
increases his influence over them tenfold. Then 
in many cases they start a boys' club where they 
have a room open every night, where they have 



A 



ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 83 

debates, newspapers and books. Then the cap- 
tain gets to know the boys personally. He has 
them up to tea now and then, and gets to know 
their people. 

In addition to that general work, there are one 
or two additions which are thrown in by special 
companies according to their own inclination. 
A great many have started military bands. Am- 
bulance classes are becoming exceedingly popu- 
lar. After drilling two or three winters the work 
gets flat; so they invent new things. Boys cannot 
join this Brigade until they are twelve years of 
age, and cannot clear out until they are seventeen. 
The boys hate to clear out ; and the fact that they 
will have to leave induces them to make better 
use of their time. Of course they are not turned 
adrift. The captain sees that they get into good 
hands. Then every year, in a city of the size of 
Boston, for instance, all the boys belonging to the 



84 ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 

Brigade would be gathered together for a church 
service. If too many for one church, two would 
be secured, and the boys would assemble and 
march to the service and get a boys' sermon. At 
Christmas, every boy in the Brigade gets from his 
officer a little two-cent book. And there are a 
number of other little things that link the captain 
and the boys together and the different com- 
panies together. 

This organization was started within a mile of 
where I live in Glasgow in 1883, by a Mr. Smith, 
who was a soldier, and who was not making 
much of a Sunday-school class he taught, and 
who conceived the idea of giving them military 
discipline. In our country we have grown to 
such an extent that already there are, I think, 
22,000 boys belonging to the Brigade, and 
I think between 1,100 and 1,200 officers — cap- 
tains and lieutenants. This Brigade has been 



ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 85 

worth starting for the sake of the officers 
alone. 

Perhaps one thousand of these officers would 
have belonged to the unemployed rich and edu- 
cated, if they had not struck this particular line 
of work. There are multitudes of young men 
who do not go to prayer meeting or see their way 
to teach in Sunday-school. Many are extremely 
fastidious as to what particular work they will do, 
and many are not cut out for these recognized 
fields. But here is a work that does not make any 
particular strain on any part of his nature. He 
simply gives himself and his muscular Christian- 
ity. So we think this has been worth pushing 
for the sake of the officers alone. We know a 
great many men have been made for life simply 
by a year or two of contact with these boys. 
If they develop the boys, the boys develop 
them. 



86 ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 

Now, you have this movement started in Amer- 
ica. I find the most crass ignorance on this sub- 
ject here; but in some respects you are ahead 
of us. One of the first things you do with the 
boys is to start a newspaper. The conflagration 
has broken out in a somewhat remarkable way in 
CaHfornia, and they must have a great many 
companies. As usual^ when you take up any- 
thing in this country from anywhere else, you 
improve upon it or carry it to development in 
other directions. 

Now, you do some things here we do not do, 
and of which I am not perfectly sure we would 
wholly approve. They strike us as being slightly 
against some of the fundamental principles for 
which we work. For instance, I notice that the 
boys here have a uniform, and that the officers 
have a uniform. We can make a boy for about 
fifty cents, not including the brass in his face; 



ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 87 

but here in America the uniform costs as follows: 
(See Boys' Brigade Manual, U. S. of A.) 

Fatigue blouses (I suppose they 
have paid duty on these 

blouses) $3.35 

Pants 3.35 

Fatigue caps, first quality 75 

Belts 75 

Plain bugles 25 

Signal service 1.20 

U. S. Army bunting flags 9.50 

Silk cord for same 3.50 

Bugler's stripes for pants 1.50 

Extra fine officers' fatigue blouses 6.75 

Pants with stripes 6.50 

U. S. Army officers' overcoats 

with hoods $27 to 32.00 

"Well, you see that means business at any rate. 
But what we dislike about it is that it emphasizes 
the military side too much. We have refused to 
admit any company into the Brigade that wears a 
uniform. There are one or two in the country, 
but we won't have them. We don't want the bovs 



88 ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 

to feel soldiers beyond the point that we need 
them to feel soldiers. We don't want them to 
thirst for blood and come over here and fight you 
or anybody else. We simply want to get them 
disciplined. I suppose there must be in this 
country quite a number of companies equipped 
at very considerable expense. These boys cannot 
afford to buy these uniforms for themselves, and 
they are very frequently bought by subscription. 
This organization in America is almost always 
organized within the church. In the old country 
every organization must be associated, not nec- 
essarily with the church, but with some stable 
body that will be back of it and be a sponsor for 
it. It is usually the church — sometimes the Y. M. 
C. A. In this country the initiatory is frequently 
taken by the minister. I find the ministers here 
preserve the dew of their youth and the freshness 
of their manhood, and they are not at all the 



ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 89 

starchy kind of people one meets in some other 
countries. It is not because they are not fit 
for this^ but the ministers must not have all the 
plums. They have enough to do. Here and 
there we have some keen ministers at this work, 
but^ as a rule, we try to keep it among the laity. 
In this country you make the boys promise 
that as long as they are members of the Boys' 
Brigade they will not use liquor and tobacco, 
will obey the rules and set an example of good 
conduct. The question is whether pledges are 
right fair to a boy at all. I very much question 
whether it is wise to put a strong pledge like that 
upon anybody. We exact no pledge whatever. 
It seems to me to be the difference between com- 
pulsory chapel attendance and optional, as it is 
here, to make a boy not smoke by compulsion. 
If he can be made moral by the influences that are 
brought to bear upon him, it is more apt to last. 



90 ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 

Now I suppose I was asked to present this sub- 
ject to you in behalf of enhsting one or two of you 
in the service. I do not know myself of any bit 
of work to which I would rather give what spare 
time I have than this. The boy is open to receive 
impressions in a way that is marked. It is pos- 
sible to get hold of him. There are thousands 
of these boys who have been turned outside in. 
I have watched them. I remember the annual in- 
spection of one of the first companies. When the 
prizes were given, it was my duty to pin the med- 
als on the two leading boys' breasts. When the 
first boy came up, there was scarcely a place on 
his coat strong enough to bear the pin. His coat 
was one mass of patches that could scarcely hold 
together. He was clean. The next year I no- 
ticed he had on a much better coat, and I am sure 
he is now on his way to turn out to be a good 
man. I do not know anything that would pay 



ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 91 

any of you better than this. It lies near a young 
man's nature to take up such work. I do not 
think there is anything easier than to win a boy. 
You get him wound about you, and he Hves 
through your spectacles and tries to please you. 
Adapt it any way you please; but I should like 
very much if after to-night some of you would 
write for some of this literature and take the 
trouble to spread it. 

We gave the boys books each Christmas. Two 
years ago I wrote a book and offered fifty-three 
prizes. The boys competing were to write a let- 
ter addressed to *'My Dear Baxter," and an- 
swer the question, ''What are a Boy's Tempta- 
tions, and How is He to Meet Them?" Well, I 
got about 450 dissections of the boys in answer 
to that ofifer. One of the thirty prizes went to 
California. I never saw such a revelation of the 
interior of a boy as I saw after reading those let- 



92 ONE WAY TO HELP BOYS 

ters. Every boy, almost, out of the lot, pleaded 
guilty to four sins. Every boy, apparently, is a 
liar and a thief. These were the first two things 
that they all confessed. The third confession was 
that they all swore ; and the fourth great tempta- 
tion or sin to a boy was smoking — which is not a 
sin at all. It showed me that the boys were very 
badly taught, and that they have no definite con- 
ception of sin. 

Every one of these Brigades, almost without an 
exception, is connected with the church. The 
Bible class is held in the church; and the drill is 
usually there, too. It is thoroughly under the 
wing of the church. The movement is so relig- 
ious that there is never any religious opposition 
to it, arid it is entirely undenominational. 



A 



\ 



AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER; 



OR. 



THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY 



IV 

AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER; 

OR 

THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY. 

I am asked to talk specially to what we call in 
Scotland ''the outsider" — the man who has not 
seen his way to throw in his lot with Christian 
men. We have made a specialty of the outsider 
in our university work in the old country. We 
have laid all our plans to interest him. He is gen- 
erally the best man in the university; and for 
some years we have arranged all our Christian 
work and worship with a view to that type of 

95 



96 AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER; OR, 

man. We have laid down one or two principles. 
The first one is that none of us in any shape or 
form shall encourage cant. By that I mean sanc- 
timoniousness, anything that is falsetto, any un- 
real expression of emotion or exaggeration of 
feeling. A second principle we have had to lay 
down is that no religious man shall interfere in 
any shape or form with the university amuse- 
ments. Time after time I have seen at our re- 
ligious meetings twelve out of the fifteen univer- 
sity football team; and we have always had 
amongst our foremost men the best athletes in 
the university. We have also laid it down as a 
principle that we shall not interfere with any uni- 
versity work. We have tried to get hold of the 
busiest men and interest them in whatever is 
going on, believing that a man may do his uni- 
versity work thoroughly and yet do something 
in the way of helping on the Christian life of his 



THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY 97 

fellow students. In the Medical Faculty, where 
we have from 1,800 to 2,000 students, and which 
is our largest faculty in Edinburgh University, at 
the end of the four years' course we have the 
"Blue Ribbon Medical Course" scholarship. It 
is given to the man who has stood first all along 
the line for four years. Now the man who for the 
last four years has taken this scholarship has been 
not only one of the most active workers in the 
Christian community, but actually the secretary 
of the movement. I do not mean that one man 
has done that for four years ; but the last four men 
have been not only the leading men in the scien- 
tific and professional studies, but the leading men 
in the Christian life of the place. With such a 
record as that you can understand that Christian- 
ity is, at all events, respected. 

We never have any religious meetings on week 
days. We do not want the professors to say we 



98 AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER ; OR, 

are taking up the time the men ought to give 
other things. We beHeve a man's business at a 
college, and his religion, too, is to do his work. 
The meetings we have had, therefore, were on 
Sundays. 

Another rule that we have had to make is 
never to interfere with a man's views. We want a 
man's life. We do not want his opinion. We do 
not start a man with a creed. We believe that 
the man arrives at a creed; and we take into our 
ranks any man who has any desire to seek the 
Kingdom of God. That, of course, had widened 
the door to a very large number of men who 
would have kept out, if we had been exclusive. 
But while we do not underrate a creed, while we 
believe that theological doctrines are just as 
scientific doctrines; yet religion is an art, and we 
can get men to practice the art who will arrive, 
we hope, in their future life, at something of the 



THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY 99 

scientific principles which underlie it; but we 
make it a barrier to no man at the start that he 
knows little. In fact, a man enters the school of 
Christ as he enters a university. That is to say, 
he enters, not as a professor, but as a student. 
He comes to learn; and we believe the best way 
to learn is to let the man matriculate and begin. 
If you ask me what obstacles we find specially 
in the way, I think the chief obstacle we meet is 
the revolt in thinking men's minds against popu- 
lar and spurious and weak forms of Christianity. 
Men come to the institution who have been very 
strictly brought up, and they are not able, after a 
few months' college discipline, to believe the 
things they used to believe. A gentleman in Bos- 
ton said to me a few days ago that he had a son 
at Harvard and that the young man had the au- 
dacity to come to him not long ago and tell him 
that he didn't believe so and so. I said to him: 



100 AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER; OR, 

''Sir, what a splendid fellow your son must be." 
He preferred truth to comfort. A man is to be 
encouraged to think about rehgious matters. If 
Christianity cannot bear thinking about, it is not 
worth going in for. 

One other thing that one finds is the idea 
many men have that it is a dull thing to go in for 
Christianity. Now, of course, that is simply not 
true. It is not true in fact, and it is not true in 
theory. It has, doubtless, more concern for a 
man's temperament and body than his creed; but 
if there is anything that can put sunniness or 
brightness into a man's life, it is Christianity. 
Christianity professes to cure dullness. Some of 
the greatest words in the Bible are "joy," "rest," 
"comfort." Christianity cures depression and 
gloom by removing the causes of it. What makes 
men depressed? Self-concentration, as a rule. 
When a man is wrapped up in himself, seeking 



THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY loi 

only his own, he finds he is seeking a very shallow 
object, and very soon gets to the end of it; hence 
all the springs of life have nothing to act upon, 
and depression follows. Now, Christianity cures 
that by trying to take a man out of himself, and 
by showing him that his true life is in living out of 
himself. 

Another source of dullness is the thwarting of 
the ambitions that we have. We get down in 
spirits because we do not get the recognition we 
think we deserve, because we are snubbed and 
slighted, because we are not at the top. Christian- 
ity cures that by a single sentence. It says: "The 
meek shall inherit the earth." There is no con- 
nection between Christianity and a dull life. It 
is the want of Christianity that makes any life 
dull. Christianity offers a young man, or an old 
man, or any man, a more abundant life than the 
life he is living — more life as life goes, more hap- 



102 AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER; OR, 

piness in life, more intensity in life, more worthi- 
ness in life. 

That, however, is perhaps not so great an 
obstacle, comparatively a trifling one, as the 
thought many men have that it is an unscientific 
thing in these days to endorse Christianity. Now 
it may be unscientific to endorse some forms in 
which Christianity is presented, but Christianity 
itself is a thoroughly scientific thing. There is 
nothing the least narrow about anything that 
Christ ever said. On the contrary, Christ said 
the broadest things that have ever been said; and 
he never rebuked breadth, but constantly re- 
buked narrowness. In His day there were three 
great philosophical, theological schools. There 
v/ere the Pharisees, who were so narrow that 
they could not see spirit for form. There were 
the Sadducees, who were so narrow that they 
could not see spirit for matter. And there were 



THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY 103 

the Essenes, who could not see matter for spirit. 
Christ was always rebuking these sects simply on 
account of their narrowness. His own view of 
life was as broad as the heavens. He took in 
every man and every part of every man. His 
religion was not kept back by any geographical 
or ethnographical limits. It was the religion of 
humanity. 

You say, ''But it is well known that many 
scientific men are opposed to Christianity." I 
ask you to give me their names. If you run over 
the names of the large figures in science at this 
moment, you will find that the majority are not 
only in favor of Christianity, but have expressed 
themselves in favor of it. 

Mr. Huxley has never said anything against 
Christianity. He has defined the position of sci- 
ence. He says, "Science is not Christianity, nor 
is it anti-Christianity. It is extra-Christianity." 



104 AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER; OR, 

He has thrown an arrow, with a little poison on 
it, perhaps, at some of the outworks of Christian- 
ity; but he has never said one word against Christ 
or the words or spirit of Christ. And it matters 
little what a man does to the outworks so long as 
he respects and is compelled to respect Christ; 
and Christianity is always respected, however 
humbly it is lived, by the wisest men. 

The other day I came upon a statement by a 
Fellow of the Royal Society with regard to this 
subject, a sentence of which I should like to read 
to you. The Royal Society of London, as you 
know, is probably one of the first scientific bodies 
in the world. This man says: "I have known the 
British Association for the Advancement of Sci- 
ence under forty-one different presidents — all 
leading men of science. On looking over these 
forty-one names, I count twenty, who, judged by 
their public utterances or private communica- 




THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY 105 

tions, are men of Christian belief and character; 
while, judged by the same test, only four disbe- 
lieve in direct divine revelation." 

You point to Mr. Darwin. Mr. Darwin never 
had, and never gave himself, a chance. He was 
brought up on Paley's Natural Theology — a 
great book in its day, but a book which Darwin 
himself made it impossible to read to-day; and 
he was bombarded with that book, and with re- 
ligion along that line; and we have no evidence 
that he ever studied Christianity in any other 
form. But wherever he saw it, he respected it. 
When he was on the Island of Terra del Fuego, 
he saw the lowest subjects in the world. He told 
the missionaries they might go home. It was an 
impossibility, from the point of view of science, 
that these men could ever be elevated. A very 
few years after, Mr. Darwin wrote a letter to the 
secretary of that missionary society saying that 



io6 AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER; OR, 

he had found out what a great change had come 
over these islands — a certain amount of civiHza- 
tion had been introduced, and moraHty had been 
estabHshed; and he would like to withdraw what 
he had said. He enclosed a check for twenty- 
five dollars for the work of the society; and he 
continued sending in his annual contribution io 
the end of his life. 

Perhaps the greatest name known to you in the 
old country is that of Sir William Thompson, now 
Lord Kelvin, Professor of Physics in Glasgow 
University. If you go into his class room any day 
you like, you will hear him open his lecture with 
prayer. 

It is not true that the scientific men have given 
up Christianity. Many of them have given up im- 
itations of Christianity, spurious forms of it; but 
the thing itself stands untouched. 

You ask me, ''What, then, do you retain? Do 



1 




THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY 107 

you dilute Christianity until it means little or 
nothing — so little that anybody can call himself a 
Christian?" On the contrary, we make it the 
most severe thing, the most definite thing, that a 
man could choose for his object in life. We make 
it a necessity that a man shall be turning, that he 
shall seek first the Kingdom of God. He may 
choose his own way of doing it; but he must put 
that before him as an ambition and as his career 
to seek first the Kingdom of God. We say noth- 
ing to those men about saving their souls. We 
say to them: "Gentlemen, save your lives. Do 
something with your life. Let that energy, that 
talent, go out to some purpose. The world needs 
the knowledge you have, the impulses you can 
give; aye, and the criticisms that you can ofifer 
upon the religious forms round about. It needs 
all these things. Save your lives. Do something 
with them." The Kingdom of God, according to 



io8 AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER; OR, 

Christ's own definition, is leaven; it is salt; it is 
light. Can you tell me what is going to raise this 
country, for instance, if it is not to be Christian- 
ity? If you take the Christianity out of Boston, 
weak as some of it may be, and inconsistent as 
some of it may be, in fifty years it will be unin- 
habitable by a respectable man or woman. Was 
it Mr. Lowell who said: "Show me ten square 
miles in any part of the world, outside of Chris- 
tianity, where the life of man and the purity of 
woman are safe, and I will give up Christianity"? 
There are no such ten square miles in any part of 
the world. Many things can lift society a little; 
but, as a matter of fact and history, the thing that 
has lifted the nations of the world to their present 
level has been, in some form or other, direct or 
diffused, the Christianity of Christ. Christian men 
are to be not only the leaven of the world, but 
they are to be the salt of the earth. The world is 



I 



THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY 109 

not only sunken, needing to be raised, but it is 
rotten, and needing to be purified. Salt is that 
which saves from corruption. Christianity is the 
salt of the earth. It is the great antiseptic of so- 
ciety. Christian men are the light of the world. 
The light of Christ was the light of men; and 
other men are to catch that light and radiate it 
upon the world. 

You point me to other teachers, many of them 
very great, many of them v/ith great messages 
for the world — Socrates, Plato — a long list of 
names ; but, allowing all their goodness, can one 
of them be put beside Christ as a mere teacher? 
Socrates went about the world asking questions. 
Christ went about the world answering questions. 
That was the difference. Socrates was looking 
for truth. Christ said truth is in living. I am 
the truth ; and the man who lives like Me 
will live true, and all the wrong in the mind 



no AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER; OR, 

will be corrected. You cannot help seeing 
truth. 

Now, gentlemen, what do you think of that for 
a life, for a career? You do not know what to do 
with yourself. What do you think of being a 
crystal of salt in a community such as this city, or 
a little cell of leaven which cannot help, by the 
mere contagion of its presence, passing on in- 
fluence and life to things round about it, or being 
a light to the dark people, perhaps the dark Chris- 
tians, if you like, round about, too? 

Do the workingmen of this country not need 
light? What is to alter the critical condition of 
the working classes in this country, if it is not to 
be the teaching of Christianity in some form? 
What is to guide these labor movements and to 
work upon the minds in all directions, to make 
this country continuously prosperous? Men 
who have looked deepest into these problems 



THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY in 

have either given them up or seen only one solu- 
tion, and that is in the teaching of Christ and the 
application of His principles to common life. 
These principles are not in the air. They are jus- 
tified by every fact and law of nature. 

I believe in Christianity, first of all, not because 
I believe in this book. I believe in this book be- 
cause I believe in Christianity. Religion does 
not come out of the Bible. The Bible comes out 
of religion. I believe in Christianity because I 
believe in evolution. Christianity is to me fur- 
ther evolution. I know no better definition of it 
than that. The forces of nature carry a man up to 
a certain point and there they stop. Then the 
psychic forces carry him up another point to the 
evolution of mind. Then the moral forces come 
in and carry him up a little further. Then the 
vis a tergo, the struggle for life that pushes him 
on, is reinforced by a vis a fronto ; and he sees 



112 AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER; OR, 

ideals before him, and is drawn up higher and 
higher, from strength to strength, until he 
reaches the fullness of the stature of the perfect 
man. That is pure evolution, the evolution of the 
man toward the ideal, toward the perfect man 
Jesus Christ. This principle of which I have 
been speaking, of a man giving his life to other 
people, to help on his country, is in the very 
heart of nature. There are two great principles 
in nature by which all things work and by which 
all things are moved. The one is the struggle for 
life. Every plant and animal starts out to nourish 
itself. That struggle goes on along the line of 
the function of nutrition. There is the struggle 
for the life of others — the function of reproduc- 
tion. These two functions make up life. Now, 
most of us live along the line of the first. All our 
lives, nearly, are centered in that ; but that is only 
one half of the life appointed by nature. There is 



THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY 113 

the struggle for the life of others, the function of 
reproduction, and in its higher forms everything 
that is high lies. All the happiness in life, in real- 
ity, has come along the second of these two lines, 
and not along the first. All the life of the world, 
in reality, lies on the side of reproduction. A 
plant takes a little bit of itself and gives it away. 
It lives by death. It dies ; the life goes on. This 
chapel is built upon death. That book is death. 
Those pillars are the death of men. Those clothes 
are the death of animals. Every part of life and 
everything in life is kept alive by death. The 
animal gives off a part of itself and dies. Its life 
goes on — has passed on; and I say all the comfort 
and happiness and beauty and luxury of life come 
along that line. Three-fourths of the world at this 
moment live upon rice. What is rice? It is a seed 
— a fruit, therefore, of reproduction. The world 
lives upon this altruistic principle. All the fruits 



114 AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER; OR, 

of the world are the gifts of reproduction. All the 
drinks of the world are the fruits of reproduction 
— the milk of the cow, the sprouting grain, the 
malted liquor, the withered hop, the fruit of the 
vine^ wine itself. All the beauty of the world 
comes along the line of reproduction — the feath- 
ers of the bird, the fire of the glow-worm, the face 
of a woman. All the music of the world is love- 
music — the chorus of the insect, the song of the 
nightingale, the serenade of the lover. We live 
by what the function of reproduction has done for 
us ; and the man who gives his life for what is go- 
ing on in that line is living for the highest end in 
nature. 

The struggle for life is waning every cen- 
tury, and by and by it will give place entirely to 
this other. Therefore, when Christ said, "Seek 
first the Kingdom of God," he propounded a per- 
fectly scientific doctrine. He was offering man a 




THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY 115 

life which would include all other lives, to v/hich 
all other things would be heir. 

Let me give you an illustration of what I 
mean. You are here at the university. You can't 
yet begin to do anything for your country, as you 
might. What you can do now is to leaven this 
university. What you can do is to get hold of 
some one man, whose life is of no account, and 
which is apparently not going to be of any ac- 
count, and save that man, not for his own sake 
only, but because that is a piece of energy which 
has gone of¥ but can be brought in and reclaimed 
and utilized for the good of man. 

There was a medical student in Edinburgh Uni- 
versity in his second year (our course is four 
years), who saw that he had been living there 
eighteen months entirely for himself. He had 
never done a hand's turn to be of any good or use 
to any one, and it hurt him. One day he deter- 



ii6 AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER; OR, 

mined that he would do something to help an- 
other man, and he remembered another under- 
graduate, who had come from the same country 
town as himself, and who had gone to pieces. He 
hunted him up. He found him half drunk in a 
very poor and shabby lodging. He told him that 
he would like him to come and live in his rooms; 
that he had nice rooms, and it was snugger than 
where he was. The other man stated he was in 
debt and could not leave. No. i went out of the 
room, paid the man's bill, sent for a carriage, 
bundled up his friend's things — and a newspaper 
held them all — and took him off to his own lodg- 
ings. The next morning he said: "Now, you and 
I are going to live together. Let us make a con- 
tract and both sign it." 

There were four articles in it. 

''First, neither one of us is to go out alone, un- 
less absolutely necessary. 



THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY 117 

"Second, twenty minutes to be allowed to go 
from room to college for recitations. Overtime to 
-be accounted for. 

"Third, one hour to be given every night to rec- 
reation. 

"Fourth, bygones to be bygones.'* 

They both signed it. Everything went on well. 
They had lived together for six weeks when one 
night No. 2 sprang up, shut his book with a bang 
and said: "I can't stand this slow life. I must 
have a bust." "Very well/' said No. i, "you shall 
bust here. What do you want?" "I want some 
drink." "Well, you shall have it," said No. i, 
and he got him something to drink and brought it 
to the room. No. 2 took it. Do you say it was a 
risk? His thirst was allayed and the wild beast 
was calmed. He settled down to his books for 
six weeks again, when the wild beast once more 
asserted itself. No. i gave it a meal to satisfy it, 



ii8 AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER; OR, 

as before. No. 2 worked faithfully this time for 
three months before another outbreak. And so 
the thing went on. A year afterward No. 2 said 
to No. I : "You never tell me what you are read- 
ing at the recreation hour. I think I see you read 
the Bible sometimes. You never talked to me on 
that subject." Talked to him about it! What 
was the use of talking to a man about Christianity 
when he was living it every hour of his life? He 
had done his work without ever having said a 
word. No. 2 was dying to learn his secret. I 
need not detail the rest. These two men passed 
out of the University at the end of their course. 
No. I passed a fairly good examination. No. 2, 
the man who was lost, graduated with honors and 
took the medal for his thesis. The last time I 
heard of No. i he was filling an important ap- 
pointment in London, and No. 2 is known as "the 
Christian Doctor" of a village in Wales. Now 



THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY 119 

that seems to me to be a thing worth living for; 
something to look back upon after one's college 
life is over. 

No one knew anything about this. No. i was 
never known as a specially religious man, and 
yet, in his quiet way, he was living Christ in every 
direction; and he left more fragrance behind him 
when he was gone than a dozen of the noisier 
men. 

I ask you, gentlemen, to save your lives, to save 
your college days, and I appeal to the generous 
side of you and ask you to remember your fel- 
low men. Remember the man who is going to 
pieces; remember the man who is down, the man 
who is tempted. Perhaps if you would stand by 
him you could help him through. You need not 
make any great profession of religion. But, if 
you do that, you will make a great practice of it. 
It will amount to little, after the college course is 



120 AN APPEAL TO THE OUTSIDER; OR, 

over, that you have merely done your work and 
passed. What is the use of your passing, what is 
the use of your getting any degree, unless it is go- 
ing to be of some use to somebody else? There 
is no particular reason why nine-tenths of us 
should be alive at all ; but the man who begins to 
live for the Kingdom of God, who sees a chance 
to do a good turn here and a little one there, and 
shed a little light here and a little sunniness there, 
has something to live for. That man's life will 
never be lost. He lives a more abundant life. 
There is no other joy or light in the world except 
that. 

And if you gentlemen are going to seek the 
Kingdom of God, I want to ask you to seek it 
first. Do not touch it unless you promise to seek 
it first. I promise you a miserable life and in- 
fluence and a poor, broken, lost career, if you seek 
it second. Seek it first, or let it alone. Do not be 



THE CLAIMS OF CHRISTIANITY 121 

an amphibian ; no man can serve two masters, 
and, if you only knew it, it is a thousand times 
easier to seek first the Kingdom of God than 
to seek it second. I have not the slightest 
doubt there are many men who are seeking 
second the Kingdom of God, and their religion 
is a nuisance to them. It is hard to keep up, 
and they would get rid of it if they could. The 
cure is to seek it first, to make it the helm of life. 
Then only can a man's life go straight, and then 
only can he fulfill the destiny for which God has 
put him into the world. 



LIFE ON THE TOP FLOOR 



k 



LIFE ON THE TOP FLOOR 

You have had a great time on the mountains, 
but remember the mountain is not a place to live 
on. The Mount of Transfiguration is an episode, 
coming to a man from time to time ; but it is not 
in the ordinary course of nature that a man should 
always live on the top of the mountain. The 
mountain is of use to send streams into the val- 
ley of our ordinary life, to fertilize and nourish 
what is there. Perhaps it is not possible that we 
shall all be living at the same pitch at which you 
have lived during the days of this week. Before 
the sacramental wine was dry on the lips of Peter 

he was untrue to his Saviour. A breakdown to 

125 



126 LIFE ON THE TOP FLOOR 



the moral life is just as natural, and just as much 
a matter of law as the breakdown of an engine. 
It is important to get to the bottom of these 
causes. One of the most important things for us 
to study is the anatomy of the soul, the anatomy 
of temptation, and the ph3siology of sin. 

You will not agree with me, perhaps, but I 
have a strong suspicion that the evolutionists are 
on the right track when they tell us that man's 
body has come up through the animal creation. 
Bone for bone, muscle for muscle and nerve for 
nerve, you and I are exactly the same as the high- 
er vertebrae of the animal kingdom ; and after we 
passed through the animal kingdom, it is sup- 
posed by the theorists, we underwent a long pro- 
bation in which we were somewhat in the condi- 
tion of the red Indian; and, just as we had the 
bodies of animals, we had to some extent the 
minds of animals and the dispositions of savages. 



LIFE ON THE TOP FLOOR 127 

If the animal has left me as its legacy a vertebral 
column and certain nerves, why should it not 
leave me a legacy of its modes and passions? 
And if I have once had as my ancestors a long 
race of savages, why should not the modes and 
predilections of the savage nature be still in my 
blood? If I have the blood of the tiger, shall I 
not have to some extent the spirit of a tiger? If 
I have the blood of a shark, shall I not be in- 
clined sometimes to play the shark? If I have 
the blood of a fox, shall I not be inclined some- 
times to be foxy? Well, it doesn't matter in, the 
least whether that is true or not, but I appeal to 
you if it is not a fact that you find in yourselves 
the residuum of many animals and the disposition 
of many savages. If there is a man who has 
nothing of the animal in him, I should like you 
to introduce me to him. It doesn't matter where 
it came from. It is there, as a matter of fact. 



128 LIFE ON THE TOP FLOOR 

That is to say, man is built in three stories. He 
is a three-storied structure. On the ground floor 
there dwells the animal. Above that, on the sec- 
ond story, there is the savage. And on the third 
floor there is the man. Now, my brother, when 
you go wrong, it is not you who goes wrong, it 
is the man who lives in the bottom story. And 
when you collapse, when you imagine that it is 
impossible for you to recover again, remember 
that the true man in you is still there; and that 
although temptations may come to you from these 
lower parts of your nature, it is not essential that 
you should live in idle acquiescence to them. By 
taking to pieces the moral nature, one sees very 
clearly what temptation really is. It is the appeal 
of the animal to the man ; and it is no sin for man 
to hear that appeal. It is no sin for a man to be 
tempted. In virtue of his nature, man must be 
tempted, It is when a man leaves the top story 



LIFE ON THE TOP FLOOR 129 

and deliberately walks down and spends an hour 
in the cellar that temptation passes from tempta- 
tion into sin. 

In the same way, one sees very clearly from 
that little piece of anatomy, how it is possible to 
overcome temptation. The remedy, of course, is 
simply to decline ever to move in the lower re- 
gions of one's being at all, to regard that as a 
thing evolved past, and to live constantly in the 
higher regions. When a man does that, it is im- 
possible for him to break down. Put it in this 
way. An image is thrown upon the screen of 
your mind and you look at it. How can you dis- 
miss it? You can only dismiss it by throwing 
another image on the screen which will be more 
beautiful, more pure and more attractive, and 
which, above all, will pre-occupy your mind so 
that the other image will fade away. It is impos- 
sible, I think, in most cases, for the man to de- 



130 LIFE ON THE TOP FLOOR 

/ 

liberately fight the temptation when it comes in 
certain forms. The only thing he can do is to re- 
place that form by another form. You can do 
something with temptation at its first stage. You 
can do everything with it. You can do a little 
\vith it at the second stage, but you can do noth- 
ing with it after it passes to the third stage. If 
you let it pass that, you are over Niagara. You 
m.ust fight it, not by direct fight, but by flight to 
the higher regions. Paul summed it up in a sin- 
gle sentence, where he said : "Walk in the spirit, 
and ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh." In 
plain English, walk in the fourth flat, and you will 
not do the things that people do in the cellar. 
You cannot be in two places at once. If you 
make up your mind to live continuously in the 
spirit, ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. 
Spirit is there contrasted with flesh. It does not 
mean primarily the Holy Spirit, although it in- 



LIFE ON THE TOP FLOOR 131 

eludes that. It is here contrasted primarily with 
the flesh. Either live a cellar or a top-story life, 
a dog life or a man life. Walk among spiritual 
things, among high people — not necessarily re- 
ligious things, but spiritual things. Look not on 
the things which are seen, but the things which 
are unseen. Be in the company of good books, 
beautiful pictures, and charming, delightful and 
inspiring music ; and let all that one hears, sees, 
reads and thinks lift and inspire the higher. The 
man who does that is kept above the lower nature. 
Many and many a thing which is not directly 
religious, therefore, comes in to make up a part of 
the nourishment of the spiritual life. 

We can always live a high life. We can al- 
ways have before us beautiful, divine ideals, and 
the sudden attempt to get from the lower to the 
higher is the transition between the life of the 
flesh and the life of the spirit, and the passing 



132 LIFE ON THE TOP FLOOR 

from the one region into the other is done by a 
sudden act, by a sudden mental movement, by a 
transference of one's interests from one region to 
another. That mental movement, I think, may 
be dignified with the name of prayer. That sud- 
den appeal to the purer image which is to dis- 
place the other and let it fade away is the spas- 
modic act of prayer, which instantly places one 
in the spiritual region ; and that is one of the 
highest uses of prayer, not to get something di- 
rectly from heaven, but to switch everything up, 
and not down. If you could keep a Christian and 
a God-like spirit, it would be impossible for you 
to have the lower appetites again. 

If you w^ant to get a man on his feet again, the 
thing to do is not to preach or read the Bible to 
him, but to get him. out of the cellar in which he 
lives. Take him by the hand, and he will be led 
away from his former life. Those are psycho- 



LIFE ON THE TOP FLOOR 133 

logical principles founded upon the fact that the 
attention cannot be directed to two things at the 
same moment. You see that, upon merely psy- 
chological principles, the man who understands 
his nature and applies that remedy for his case 
when he finds himself becoming a lower man than 
he ought to, is bound to get the victory. It is 
not by magic that men are able to succeed in liv- 
ing a high and Christian life. It is by living 
according to nature and according to the revela- 
tion of our higher nature. It is by living along 
the line of the laws under which this system of 
our human nature is founded. That is put in 
other words by Christ, where he says, "Abide in 
me" — the same thing on a still higher plane. The 
man who lives with Christ cannot sin. "If any 
man sin," John says, "he hath not known Christ." 
Sin is abashed in the presence of Christ. The 
man who lives in Christ as his ideal finds in Him 



134 LIFE ON THE TOP FLOOR 

a continuous living Saviour, drawing him away 
from himself and making it impossible for him 
to live for himself. 

Let no man here to-night think or say that he 
can get victory over sin alone. He cannot get 
that out of religion unless he gets a great many 
other things as well, and is compelled to accept 
them. Deliverance from sin is only one of the 
functions of the new nature; and a man is not a 
new man if he has got only one arm. The one 
arm is to fight sin. He must be a full, perfect 
man ; and the man who has simply got the muscle 
in his spiritual nature which is to deal with sin 
is not a Christian man at all necessarily. The 
man who attempts to live in one function alone 
will find it impossible. Religion is not a blue 
ribbon to wear against a single set of things. It 
is not an inoculation against a single disease. A 
man must accept Christ all around, not only as his 



LIFE ON THE TOP FLOOR 135 

Deliverer from sin, but as his friend and guide, 
his ideal and Saviour. He must walk his whole 
life, and every day of his life, in the spirit, not 
merely rushing into the top story when tempta- 
tions are at his heels, but dwelling there, in that 
place where the air is always sweet, where the 
company is always pure, and where there is noth- 
ing to hinder the soul from communing with 
God and with the stars. If a man can continu- 
ously live in that region, he is bound to grow 
better and better. That is the picture of tempta- 
tion chasing a man who walks in the Spirit. He 
hears its bark and feels its bite, like a dog's ; but 
if he is off its ground it cannot touch him. Just 
in proportion as we live in the higher regions are 
we able to evade temptations. 

In dealing with others, it is not enough to 
preach to them, to give them tracts, texts or pray- 
ers; but we must give them a new environment. 



136 LIFE ON THE TOP FLOOR 

in which the new nature can bud and flower and 
grow into perfection. Gentlemen, it is not such 
an easy business to save a man as some people 
think. It is not to be done by a few earnest 
words. That is why so many college men have 
been passed over untouched by our college Y. 
M. C. A.'s. It is not because we do not have 
meetings enough, not because we do not know the 
Bible well enough, not because we are not earnest 
enough ; but it is because we do not proceed 
rationally enough. It is because we do not sow 
seeds for individuals and live so that they may be 
compelled to live this higher life with us. We do 
not do our work half thoroughly enough. Unless 
we lay down our lives to save men, we are not 
following the Master as we ought. It is good 
business to devote our lives to individuals. It 
may not be so picturesque, but individual work, 
where every man singles out his individual to 



LIFE ON THE TOP FLOOR 137 

help and save, and stands by him, if multiplied 
through the universities, would soon win our uni- 
versities for Christ. 

Make a continuous effort by will power and 
prayer power and the power of the Spirit of God 
to walk in the spiritual region ; for nature abhors 
a vacuum. If we allow any pause to occur in 
our high living, if we leave this place, the enemy 
will come upon us, and we will be worse off after 
this Conference than we were before it. 



\\ 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

AND 

YOUR PART IN IT 



VI 

THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

AND 

YOUR PART IN IT 

"The futility of saving men by speech" is not 

a whole truth, but it is the large part of a truth. 

Imagine a life-saving crew trying to save wrecked 

mariners simply by calling to them, and not 

throwing out a life line or putting off in a boat 

after them! It is a case of life for life — a man 

laying down his own life for others, as Christ 

did. 

In talking to a man you want to win, talk to 

141 



142 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

him in his own language. If you want to get 
hold of an agnostic, try to translate what you 
have to say into simple words — words that will 
not be in every case the words in which you got 
it. It is not cant. Religion has its technical 
terms just as science, but it can be overdone ; and, 
besides, it is an exceedingly valuable discipline 
for one's self. Take a text and say, "What does 
that mean in 19th century English;" and in do- 
ing that you will learn the lesson that it is the 
spirit of truth that does one good, and not the 
form of w^ords. The form does not matter, if it 
does you good and draws you nearer to God. Do 
not be suspicious of it, if it is God's truth, in 
whatever form it may be. 

One has to do a great deal more than display 
his Christianity. He must not only talk it, but 
live it. "What is the secret of Christianity? It 
is not picking out a man here and a man there 



AND YOUR PART IN IT 143 

and making them fit to go to heaven. Christ 
came to this world, as He Himself said, to found 
a society. Have you ever thought of that concep- 
tion of Christianity? For h^undreds of years it 
has been utterly lost sight of. It is only lately 
that men are getting to see the great Christian 
doctrine of the Kingdom of God. This great 
phrase was never off Christ's lips. "The King- 
dom of God" is by far the commonest phrase in 
His speech. Have you ever given a month of 
your life to find out what Christ meant by "the 
Kingdom of God?" Every day as we pray, "Thy 
Kingdom come," has our Christian consciousness 
taken in the tremendous sweep of that prayer, 
and seen how it covers the length and breadth of 
this great world and every human being ? Christ 
was continually telling what it was. The King- 
dom of heaven is like unto this. The kingdom of 
heaven is like unto that. If there is one thing 



144 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

more prominent than another in Christ's language 
it is in explaining what the kingdom of heaven 
is, and in what the subjects of that kingdom are 
to busy themselves. The kingdom of God is a 
society for the best men working for the best end, 
with the highest motive according to the best 
principle. The Kingdom of God was to come 
without observation. Christ likened it to leaven, 
and one cannot get a better understanding of the 
meaning of His phrase than by taking His own 
metaphors. The world is sunken, Christ said, 
and it must be raised. Leaven comes from the 
same word as lever. It is that which lifts, ele- 
vates, or raises. Christ founded a society of men 
for the purpose of raising men. This leaven was 
not to disturb the form of or overturn any institu- 
tion. When you put leaven into a vessel with 
anything that is to be leavened, it does not affect 
the outward form of it; but it changes its spirit. 



AND YOUR PART IN IT 145 

The Kingdom of God is like leaven. It is to act, 
raising men by contagion, by the contact of one 
life with another. Did you ever put a little leaven 
under a microscope? If you did, you found it 
was a minute plant, perhaps one six-thousandth 
of an inch in diameter, with such an amazing 
power of propagation that, simply in contact with 
the dough, it has the effect of lifting it by means 
of the life that is in it. And so the virtue of the 
Christian's life, not by tempting it in the way of 
forcing it, but by its spontaneous, natural and 
beautiful goodness, reacts upon others. When 
men observe the fragrance of Christ and are 
reminded of Him, a longing comes over them 
to live like Him and breathe that air and 
have that calm, that beauty of character, and all 
that unconscious influence going out as a 
contagion to others. By these men the world is 
raised. 



146 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

But that is not all. The world is not only 
sunken, it is sinful. Those of you who know life 
even an inch below the surface, know that even 
in this Christian country, in our great cities, the 
world is rotten. Have you ever thought of the 
sin of the world ? Think of the sin in your own 
being. Think that the man in the next house has 
the same amount of sin in him, and all the people 
in your street are like that. Multiply that by the 
number of all the streets in your city, and that 
by the number of cities in your country, and that 
by the number of countries in the world, and you 
have a ghastly spectre under which your imagina- 
tion staggers. 

That, however, is only a single glimpse of this 
sinful world, for the sin can be taken away : "Be- 
hold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin 
of the world." How does He do it? By for- 
giving the sin of the world, and by taking it 



AND YOUR PART IN IT 147 

away, through you and me and other subjects of 
His kingdom. 

Christians, the followers of Christ, He said, are 
the salt of the earth, and it is that salt that takes 
away the rottenness of the world. He takes 
away the guilt and the power of it, and you help 
Him to remove it by being salt in the society in 
which you live. Salt is that which keeps societ}'" 
from becoming rotten. You put salt upon fish or 
meat to prevent it from becoming rotten ; and it 
is the Christian men and women in this country 
who prevent it from becoming absolutely rotten. 
Christianity is the great antiseptic of society. If 
you were to take Christianity out of New York, 
Chicago, Berlin, or Paris, those cities, in a few 
generations, would go to pieces, even physically, 
and be swept oft the earth. Now, we are to be 
the salt of Chicago, New York and the great 
cities of the world. It is our business to make 



148 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

cities and to keep those cities sweet — not only to 
scavenge away the rottenness after it has grown 
there, but to prevent the new generation that is 
growing up from becoming rotten. The work of 
salt is to prevent this, as well as to cure it. Keep 
those children pure to the end of their lives. We 
do not emphasize half enough the prevention side 
of Christian society. We do not emphasize half 
enough the making of Christian environment in 
which a Christ-like life shall be possible — new 
houses, pure air and water, good schools, bring- 
ing the influences of sweetest life and purity to 
keep those young lives from succumbing to the 
influences which surround them. The world 
which you and I have to lift is not only the world 
of the poor ; but we have to lift up our country. 

One thing, gentlemen, strikes the stranger in 
coming to this country. He goes to a city like 
Boston, and finds the merchants of that city with 



AND YOUR PART IN IT 149 

their heads buried in their ledgers, wholly occu- 
pied with their private business, while a few 
Irishmen, holding the city offices, are carrying on 
their municipal government. Some one has de- 
fined dirt as matter in the wrong place; and it is 
matter in the wrong place for a company of Irish- 
men to regulate the affairs of the city of Boston. 
Therefore, gentlemen, if you are the subjects of 
the Kingdom of God, you must give to the world 
and to your country a reformed Boston, a re- 
formed Chicago, above all a reformed New York. 
You have been taught in your schools of your 
duties as citizens ; but you are taught in this Book 
just as plainly your duties as Christian citizens. 
These cities are m.aking the people that are living 
in them. People will not be righteous. In this 
country there is not only little honesty and hon- 
orableness in municipal life ; but, what is a thou- 
sand times worse, there is little in its possibility. 



150 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

In my country I have never known or heard of a 
member of the government, either municipal or 
state, proving false to his trust. It is your duty 
to restore righteousness in the high places of this 
government. Let the people see examples which 
will help them in their Christian life. I cannot 
speak too strongly about that, because I know 
that the thing in process of time can be done. We 
have had rotten municipal government, and the 
Christian men of the place have taken the thing 
up and said, we have determined this shall not 
be. In the old cities, they have put man after 
man into the municipal chair simply because they 
were Christian men, because they would deal 
with the people righteously, and carry out the 
programme of Christianity for the city. Let me 
tell you of the w^ork of some university men in the 
city of London. They went to a district in the 
East End — a God-forsaken and sunken place, oc- 



AND YOUR PART IN IT 151 

cupied for miles entirely by v/orking people. 
They rented a house and became known as set- 
tlers in that poor district. They gave themselves 
no airs of superiority. They did not tell the peo- 
ple they had come to do them good. They went 
in there and made friends with the people. The 
leaven went in among the dough. The salt went 
in beside that which was corrupt. We keep the 
grains of salt all together, and the other things all 
together ; but the very place where the salt ought 
not to be is beside the salt. It ought to be scat- 
tered over the meat. Well, these men were not 
in a great hurry. They waited some months and 
got to know a number of the workmen, and got 
to understand one another. They had studied the 
city, and the workingmen were astonished at how 
much the young fellows knew about city govern- 
ment, city life and education, and sanitation, 
cleansing and purity in all directions. One day 



152 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

there came a great war of labor. The working 
men put their heads together and said, "These 
young fellows have heads. Let us go and talk 
the matter over with them." In a few months 
those young men were the arbiters of a strike, and 
at a single word from them three or four thou- 
sand families were saved from being thrown out 
of work on a great strike. Is that not a Chris- 
tian thing to do ? If you understand the concep- 
tion of the Kingdom of God as a society of the 
best men working for the best ends for the amel- 
ioration of human life, you will agree with me. 
One of these young men at the next election was 
elected a member of one of the municipal boards, 
and in a few months he was the head of the 
Board. Another got into the School Board, and 
in a short time was the head of it. These men 
did not claim to be superior. They were elected 
kings by the people because the people felt their 



AND YOUR PART IN IT 153 

kingship. By and by the time came when a mem- 
ber of Parliament was to be returned. The work- 
ingmen came again to their university friends and 
said, "Whom shall we put in?" Those men told 
them, and they put him in. And so those men 
have taken possession of that city in the name 
of Jesus Christ, and have been gradually work- 
ing, leavening and salting. First, the blade; 
then, the ear; and then, the full corn in the ear. 
It is coming without observation. It is not the 
work of a day. Christians are the only agents God 
has for carrying out His purposes. Think of that. 
He could Himself, with a single breath, cleanse 
the whole of London or New York, but he does 
not do it. It is by the members of His body that 
he carries on His work. We all have different 
parts of that work to do. Some of us are thumbs, 
some of us are fingers, and some of us are only a 
little bit of the little finger. Some, again, are limbs. 



154 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

Now, that conception of Christianity as a king- 
dom is beginning to grow throughout Christen- 
dom at this hour. Every age has had its pecul- 
iar side of Christianity emphasized; and the side 
that is being emphasized now is the social side, 
that large conception of what Christ came to do, 
how He came to save men in the bulk, as it were 
— by the city and by the country ; and many of the 
movements that are going on just now in society, 
in education, in sanitation, in university extension 
and philanthropy, are all working together for 
good in that direction. Let not us, who believe in 
the salvation of the individual soul as the supreme 
thing, shut our eyes to the Christianity of Christ, 
to His great conception of the Kingdom of God. 

All the activities of Christianity may be classed 
imder one or the other of these two heads — en- 
tering the kingdom of God ourselves, and spread- 
ing it to the lives of others. The individual life 



AND YOUR PART IN IT 155 

has been at this Conference. How is it to help on 
this movement for the bringing of the world to 
Christ? I know many of you are puzzled to 
know in what direction you can start off to help 
Christ. Let me simply say this to you. Once in 
my own life I came to crossroads. I did not 
know in which direction God wanted me to help 
His kingdom, and I started to read this Book to 
find out what the ideal life was. I knew I had 
only one life, and didn't want to miss it; and I 
found out that the only thing worth doing in the 
world was to do the will of God. Whether that 
was done in the pulpit or in the slums, whether 
done in the college class room or in the street, 
didn't matter at all. "My meat and my drink," 
Christ said, "is to do the will of Him that sent 
me;" and if you make up your mind to do the 
will of God, it matters little in what direction. 
There are more posts waiting for men than there 



156 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

are men waiting for posts. Christ needs men in 
every community and in every land. It makes 
little difference whether we go to foreign lands 
or stay at home, so it is where Gods puts us. I 
am not jealous of the great missionary movement 
which has swept this country. In my own col- 
lege, at least one third of the men are going to 
the foreign mission field. I am not jealous of 
that movement. I rejoice in it. But I should 
like also to bid for men, both for my country and 
for yours, men who will give their lives to the 
Kingdom of God at home. 

You will say, ''How am I to know whether to 
go abroad or stay at home, be a lawyer or a Chris- 
tian doctor?" The first thing is, pray, of course. 
The second tiling is, think. Think over all the 
different lines of work — over all your own quali- 
fications. If you are called to the missionary 
field, think of all the different kinds of missionary 



AND YOUR PART IN IT 157 

fields, There are some that do not need you at 
all: and there are others for which you are the 
very man. It is a great mistake to suppose that 
missionary fields are all alike, and that they are 
the same in Africa as in India or China. They 
are not the same at all. Study the field. The 
third thing is, take the advice of a wise friend, but 
do not regard his decision as final. Nobody can 
plan your life for you. Do not imagine that the 
most disagreeable of two or three alternative 
things before you is necessarily the will of 
God. 

God's will does not always lie in the line of the 
disagreeable. God likes to see His children hap- 
py just as earthly fathers like to see their children 
happy, and there may be plums waiting for you 
as well as stones. Do not sacrifice to a thing that 
is disagreeable unless you are quite sure it is 
God's will. 



i 



158 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

The next thing is, when the time of decision 
comes, act, go ahead with what light you have. 
We do not manufacture a decision out of all these 
elements. We arrive at a decision. Some day, 
in a turn of the road, we find we are led. We do 
not know how. The subject just took shape in 
our minds somehow, and we arrived at a decision. 

Having once decided, the next thing is, never 
reconsider your decision. The day after a man 
makes a great life's decision, if he reconsiders it, 
he reverses it. Never reconsider such a decision. 
You will never know for months or years whether 
you have done the right thing ; but then, you will 
see that God has led every step of your way. One 
good general rule is to go in the direction of least 
resistance, if you find objections in every line and 
there is no one line positively drawing you out. 

I want to return to the immediate purpose of 
those of you who are not yet out in the mission 



AND YOUR PART IN IT 159 

field, but who have a year or two at college before 
you. I ask you to study what Christianity is, 
and to spread the knowledge of that through your 
university. There are many men in the universi- 
ties who do not know in the least what Chris- 
tianity is. When I was in the university I 
thought Christianity was a thing you might put 
on the point of a needle, and that Jesus Christ 
was a being so small that you had to search close- 
ly for Him before you found Him ; and now I 
know the whole earth is full of His glory. Study 
the Kingdom of God. See what Christ said was 
life, and how the members of that kingdom are 
to pass it on to others, to the lawyer and the doc- 
tor, until we have the professions Christianized, 
and the vvhole country will follow. It begins 
with you. Give your life for a life. 

I will close with a specific case of one of your 
own countrymen. One night I got a letter from 



i6o THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

one of the students in the University of Edin- 
burgh, with page after page of agnosticism and 
atheism. I went to see him, and spent a whole af- 
ternoon with him, but did not make the sHghtest 
impression. At Edinburgh University we have a 
students' evangehstic meeting Sunday nights, 
with an attendance of 800 or 1,000 men. A few 
nights after my conversation with this young man 
I saw him at one of these meetings. Beside him 
sat a man 1 had seen occasionally at the meetings, 
but whose name I did not know. After the meet- 
ing I spoke to the latter student and asked him if 
he knew the man sitting next to him. He said : 
"I am a graduate. After I finished my regular 
course of study, I wanted to take a post-graduate 
course ; and last year I came to Edinburgh, where, 
in the dissecting room, I happened to be placed 
near this man. I took a singular liking to him. 
I found out he was not a religious man. A year 



i 



AND YOUR PART IN IT i6i 

passed without any change in him. I went to 
pack my trunks to go home at the end of my one 
year's post-graduate work; but I was uncertain 
whether I should go and take up my profession in 
America, or stay in Edinburgh and try to win that 
one man for Christ. I decided I would stay." 
"Well," I said, ''my young fellow, it will pay you. 
You will get your man." Two or three months 
passed. It came to the night for our students' 
farewell meeting — a service some of you might 
well imitate. We have men in Edinburgh Uni- 
versity from every part of the world. Every year 
five or six hundred of them go out never to meet 
again. In our religious work we get very close 
to one another; and on the last night of the uni- 
versity year we sit down together in our common 
hall to the Lord's Supper. This is entirely a 
students' meeting ; but that night the members of 
the Theological Faculty participate, so that things 



i62 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

may be done decently and in order. There you 
see hundreds of men — the cream and the youth 
of the world — sitting down to the Lord's table, 
many of them not members of the church, there 
for the first time pledging themselves to become 
members of the Kingdom of God. I saw one, 
sitting down, passing the communion cup to his 
American friend. The American had won the 
agnostic for Christ. A week after, he was back 
to his own country. I do not know his name, 
but he was a subject of Christ's Kingdom doing 
his Master's work. A few weeks passed, and the 
friend he rescued from agnosticism came to see 
me and said : "I want to tell you that I am going 
to be a medical missionary." 

Before you leave here, make up your mind that, 
with God's help, you will try to land your man. 
Let us ask God to use us in His work. 



THE THREE ELEMENTS 



OF 



A COMPLETE LIFE 



i 



VII 
THE THREE ELEMENTS 

OF 

A COMPLETE LIFE 

Students are very often recommended to invest 

in certain books. I am going to take the liberty 

of suggesting to some of you to buy a certain 

picture Vv^hich you can get for a very few cents. 

Most of you have already seen it. It is "The 

Angelus." It is an illuminated text. God speaks 

through you. He also speaks through art. I 

want to hang up this picture as an illuminated 

text. There are three things in the picture — a 

potato field, a country lad and a country girl 

i6s 



i66 THE THREE ELEMENTS 

standing on the ground, and on the far horizon 
the spire of the village church. That is the whole 
thing. There is no great scenery, no picturesque 
scenery; just a country lad and a country girl. 
In those Roman Catholic countries, at the hour 
of evening, the church bell rings out to summon 
the people to pray. Some go into the church to 
pray ; and those that are caught in the fields when 
the Angelus rings bow their heads to engage for 
a few moments in silent prayer. 

Now, that picture is a perfect picture of Chris- 
tian life; and what is interesting about it is that 
it picks out the three great pedestals of life. 
Moody said it was not enough to have the root of 
the matter, we must have the whole thing. 



The first element in life is work. Three- 
fourths of our life is probably spent in work. Is 



OF A COMPLETE LIFE 167 

that religious, or is it not ? What is the meaning 
of it? It means, of course, that our work is just 
as religious as our worship; and unless we can 
make our work religious, three-fourths of our 
life remains unsanctified. The proof that work is 
religious is that the most of Christ's life was spent 
in work. It was not the Bible that was in His 
hands during these first thirty years of His life. 
It was the hammer and the plane. He was mak- 
ing chairs and tables and plows and yokes. That 
is to say, the highest conceivable life is in doing 
work. Christ's public ministry occupied only 
two and a half years. The great bulk of His 
time, He was simply at work ; and from that mo- 
ment work has had a new meaning given to it. 
When Christ came into the world He came to 
men at their work. He appealed to the shepherds, 
the working classes of those days. He also ap- 
pealed. to the wise men, the students of those days. 



i68 THE THREE ELEMENTS 

Three deputations of the world went out to wel- 
come him — first, the shepherds ; second, the wise 
men ; third, two old people, Simeon and Anna, in 
the temple. That is to say, Christ comes to men 
at their work, as the shepherds. He comes to 
men at their books — the wise men. He comes to 
men at their worship — Simeon and Anna. We 
find Christ, therefore, at our work, our books and 
our worship. But you will notice that it was the 
old people who found Christ at their worship, 
and, as we get older, we will cease to find Christ 
so much at our work and our books. We will then 
spend more of our time in worship than we are 
able to now, and as we get old we will repair to the 
prayer meeting and the House of God and meet 
Christ and worship Him as Simeon and Anna. 
We must try, until the time comes when much of 
our time shall be given to direct business, to find 
Christ in our books and at our common work. 



OF A COMPLETE LIFE 169 

Why should God have arranged that so many 
hours of every day should be occupied with work ? 
It is because work makes men. A university is 
not a place for making scholars. It is a place for 
making Christians. A farm is not a place for 
growing grain. It is a place for growing charac- 
ter, and a man has no character except what is 
built up through the medium of the things he does 
from day to day. God's Spirit aids it through the 
actions which he performs during his life-work. 
The student turns up every word in his Latin, in- 
stead of consulting the translation. The result is 
that honesty is translated into the student's being. 
If he gets up his mathematics thoroughly he not 
only becomes a mathematician and a learned man, 
but he becomes a thorough man. If he attends to 
the instructions that are given to him in class in- 
telligently and conscientiously he becomes a con- 
scientious man, and it is just by such means that 



I70 THE THREE ELEMENTS 

thoroughness, conscientiousness and honorable- 
ness are imbedded in our being. We do not get 
perfect character in our sleep. It comes to us as 
muscle comes, through doing things. It is the 
muscle of the soul, and it comes by exercising it 
upon actual things. Hence the meaning of our 
work is that it is the making of us, and it is only 
by and through our work that the great Christian 
graces are communicated to our souls. That is 
the means God requires for the growing of the 
Christian principles. We cannot have Christian 
character unless we use these means. Hence, gen- 
tlemen, the necessity of a student being true, first 
of all, to his work, and letting his Christianity 
show itself to his fellow students and his profes- 
sors by the integrity and the thoroughness of his 
academic work. Unless he is faithful in that 
which is least, it is impossible for him to be faith- 
ful in that which is much. The world judges a 



4 



OF A COMPLETE LIFE 171 

student by the conscientiousness and faithfulness 
with which he does his college work. I know 
men who were led to pass their examinations sim- 
ply because they had become Christians — men 
who struggled for years to pass their examina- 
tions, but who, when they became Christians, got 
to work and succeeded where they had previously 
failed. Christianity comes out in a man as much 
in his work as in his worship. Our work is not 
only to be done thoroughly, but it is to be done 
honestly. In dealing with that august thing 
called truth a man must be square with himself, 
fair to his own mind and to the principles and 
spirit of truth. We are students, and it is our 
business to get to the bottom of difficulties. Per- 
haps some truths which are revealed to us have 
deeper bottoms than we now know. We will get 
down to nuggets if we go below the surface, as 
our chairman said this morning. Christianity is 



172 THE THREE ELEMENTS 

the most important thing in the world, and the 
student ought to sound it in every direction and 
see if there is deep water and a safe place through 
which to steer his life. If there are shoals, he 
ought to know them. Therefore, when we come 
to difficulties, let us not be guilty of intellectual 
sin, jumping lightly over them. Let us be honest 
seekers after truth. We do not ask the public to 
sift doctrines, but it is the business of the student 
to exercise the intellect which God has given him. 
Faith is never opposed to reason in the New Tes- 
tament. It is often supposed to be so, but it is not. 
Faith is opposed to sight, but never to reason. It 
is only by reason that we can sift and examine and 
criticise, and be sure of the forms of truth which 
are given us as Christians. Hence a great field 
of work has opened to the student even apart 
from his academic work. Let him be sure that in 
seeking after truth he is drawing very near Christ. 



OF A COMPLETE LIFE 173 

"I am the way, the truth and the life." We talk 
a great deal about Christ as the way and about 
Christ as the life; but there is a side of Christ 
especially for the student, "I am the truth." 
Every student ought to be a truth-learner and a 
truth-seeker for Christ's sake. 

II 

The second element in life after work — and it 
ought to be put first in importance — is God. The 
Angelus is perhaps the most religious picture 
painted in this century. You cannot look at it 
aad see that young man standing in the field with 
his hat off, and the girl opposite him with her 
hands clasped and her head bowed on her breast, 
without feeling a sense of God. Gentlemen, do 
we carry about with us wherever we go a sense 
of God? If not, we have missed the greatest 
part of life. Do we have that feeling and con- 



174 THE THREE ELEMENTS 

viction of God's abiding presence wherever we 
are? Does He beset us behind and before? 
There is nothing more needed in this generation 
than a larger and more scriptural idea of God. A 
great American writer has told us that the con- 
ception of God that he got, in books and from 
sermons, when he was a boy, was that of a wise 
and very strict lawyer sitting in his office. I re- 
member very well the awful conception I got 
when I was a boy. I was given a book of Watts' 
hymns, which was illustrated, and, amongst other 
hyms, there was one about God, and it represented 
a great black, scowling thunder cloud, and in the 
midst of that cloud there was a piercing eye. 
That was placed before my young imagination as 
God, and I got the idea that God was a great 
detective, playing the spy upon my actions, and, 
as the hymn says, writing now the story of what 
little children do. That was a bad lesson. It 



OF A COMPLETE LIFE 175 

has taken years to obliterate it. We think of God 
as "up there." You know there is no such thing 
as *'up there." What would be "up there" to- 
night will be "down there" twelve hours from this 
time. Do not think of God as "up there," because 
there is no such place. Science has been "up 
there," and it has not seen God. You say God 
made the world six thousand years ago and then 
He retired. That is the last that was seen of 
Him. He made the world and then went away 
into space somewhere to look on and keep things 
going. Geology has been away back there, and 
God has gone further and further back. These 
six thousand years have extended back into ages 
and ages of long, long years. Where is God, if 
He is not back there in time or up there in space ? 
Where is He? God is in you. The Kingdom of 
God is within you and God Himself is within 
men. He is not "up there.'' When are we to 



176 THE THREE ELEMENTS 

exchange the terrible God of our childhood, the 
far-away God of our childhood, for the every- 
where-present God of the Bible? 

The God of theology has been largely taken 
from the old classical Christian-Roman writers, 
such as Augustine, who, great as they were, had 
nothing better to fling their conception of God 
upon than that of the greatest man. The greatest 
man was the Roman emperor, and therefore God 
became a kind of emperor. The Greeks had a 
far grander conception — the conception of Clem- 
ent of Alexandria, which is coming again into 
modern theology. The Greek God is the God of 
this Book; the Spirit which moved upon the 
water; the God in whom we live and move and 
have our being ; the God of whom Jesus spake to 
the woman at the well ; the God who is a spirit. 
God is a spirit. Let us gather the conception of 
the immanent God. That is the theological word 



OF A COMFLETE LIFE i77 

for it, and it is a splendid word. Immanuel, God 
with us, the inside God, the immanent God. You 
have had singular experiences since you have been 
here. What is it? It is God working in you. 
Have we really realized that God is in us and is 
working in us? God must be working in us. 
Long, long ago God made matter. Then He 
made flowers, trees and animals. Then he made 
man. Did He stop ? Is God dead ? If He lives, 
if He acts, what is He doing? He is making bet- 
ter men. He is carrying on the development of 
man. *'It is God which worketh in you." The 
buds of our nature are not all out yet. The sap 
to make them come out comes from God, from 
the indwelling immanent Christ. Our bodies, 
therefore, are the temples of the Holy Ghost. We 
must bear Christ with us wherever we go, because 
the sense of God is not kept up by logic but by 
experience. 



178 THE THREE ELEMENTS 

Most of you have heard of Hellen Kellar, the 
Boston girl who is deaf and dumb and blind. 
Until she was seven years of age her mind was, an 
absolute blank. Nothing could get into that 
blank, because all the avenues to the other world 
were closed. Then, by that great process which 
Boston has discovered, by which the blind see, the 
deaf hear and the mute speak, that girl's soul was 
opened. Bit by bit they began to build up a mind 
— to give her a certain amount of information 
and to educate her. But no one liked to tell her 
about religion. They reserved that for Phillips 
Brooks. After some years had passed they took 
her to him and he began to talk to her, through 
the young lady who had been the means of open- 
ing her senses, and was able to communicate with 
her by the delicate process of touch. Phillips 
Brooks began to tell her about God, who God was, 
what He had done, how He loved men and what 



OF A COMPLETE LIFE 179 

He was to us. The child listened very intently. 
Then she looked up and said : "Mr. Brooks, I 
knew all that before, but I didn't know His 
name." There was some mysterious pressure, 
some impelling power, some guide, some elevat- 
ing impulse, within her soul. 'Tt is God," said 
Phillips Brooks, "which worketh in you. God is 
with us and in us." 

I wonder if you have heard the story of the two 
Americans who were once crossing the Atlantic 
and met in the cabin on Sunday night to sing 
hymns. As they sang the last hymn, "Jesus, 
Lover of my Soul," one of them heard an 
exceedingly rich and beautiful voice behind 
him. He looked around, and, although he did 
not know the face, he thought that he knew 
the voice. So, when the music ceased, he 
turned and asked the man if he had been in the 
Civil War. 



i8o THE THREE ELEMENTS 

The man replied that he had been a Confederate 
soldier. 

"Were you at such a place at such a night?" 
asked the first. 

"Yes," he replied, "and a curious thing hap- 
pened that night which this hymn has recalled to 
my mind. I was posted on sentry duty near the 
edge of a wood. It was a dark night and very 
cold, and I was a little frightened because the 
enemy were supposed to be very near. About 
midnight, when everything was very still and I 
was feeling homesick and miserable and weary, I 
thought that I would comfort myself by praying 
and singing a hymn. I remember singing this 
hymn : 

" 'AH my trust on Thee is stayed. 
All my help from Thee I bring ; 

Cover my defenseless head 

With the shadow of Thy wing.' 



OF A COMPLETE LIFE i8i 

"After singing that a strange peace came down 
upon me, and through the long night I felt no 
more fear." 

•*Now," said the other, "listen to my story. I 
was a Union soldier and was in the wood that 
night with a party of scouts. I saw you stand- 
ing, although I did not see your face. My men 
had their rifles focused upon you, waiting the 
word to fire, but when you sang out : 

" 'Cover my defenseless head 
With the shadow of Thy wing' 

I said : 'Boys, lower your rifles ; we will go home." 
It was God working in each of them. Just by 
such means, by this everywhere-acting, mysteri- 
ous spirit, God keeps His Spirit moving. Hence 
that second great element in life, God, without 
Whom life is a living death. 



i82 THE THREE ELEMENTS 

III 

A moment or two about the third element in 
life. The first is "work," the second is "God/' 
the third is "love." You have noticed in that pic- 
ture the sense of companionship, brought out by 
the young man and the young woman. It mat- 
ters not whether they are brother and sister or 
lover and lover. There you have the idea of 
friendship, the final ingredient in our lives. If 
the man had been standing in that field alone, the 
scene would be almost weary. If the woman had 
been standing alone it would have been sentimen- 
tal. You can carry much away from this Con- 
ference; but we can all carry away with us some 
enrichment of our human friendship, and that 
will complete our life, because no life is complete 
unless it has that additional element in it. That, 
after all, is the divine element in life, because God 



OF A COMPLETE LIFE 183 

is love and because he that loveth is born of God. 
Therefore, gentlemen, after we leave one another, 
let us keep our friendships in repair, as some one 
says. They are worth while spending time on 
and keeping them up, because they constitute a 
large part of our life. I need not say that we 
must cultivate this spirit of friendship and let it 
grow into a great love not only for our friends, 
but for all humanity. Some of you are going 
into the mission field. Your mission field will be 
a failure unless you cultivate this element. Two 
years ago I was wandering about the coral islands 
of the Pacific, and I came to one island far remote 
from human gaze, inhabited solely by cannibals. 
At one end of the island was a missionary and his 
wife. At the other end of the island was another 
missionary and his wife. They never heard from 
other parts of the world for six months. You 
would suppose they would see each other every 



i84 THE THREE ELEMENTS 

day, but they were not on loving terms. They 
were not on speaking terms. They were on war 
terms. One had actually assaulted the other. 
What was the trouble about? It was a quarrel 
over the word in the native language they should 
use for '*God" in their translation of the New 
Testament. They needed and lacked charity, 
tenderness, tolerance, patience. 

So these three things — zvork, God, love — form 
a complete life. If your life is not comfortable, 
if you are ill at ease, ask yourself if you are not 
lacking in one or other of these three things, and 
pray for them and work for them. 



DEC 8 1899 



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